…and this is a 
History is not going to judge us kindly for this crime against humanity. Never again.
In the following waves [after the initial blast] people's bodies were terribly squeezed, then their internal organs ruptured. Then the blast blew the broken bodies at 500 to 1,000 miles per hour through the flaming, rubble-filled air. Practically everybody within a radius of 6,500 feet was killed or seriously injured and all buildings crushed or disemboweled.
Japanese doctors said that those who had been killed by the blast itself died instantly. But presently, according to these doctors, those who had suffered only small burns found their appetite failing, their hair falling out, their gums bleeding. They developed temperatures of 104, vomited blood, and died. It was discovered that they had lost 86 percent of their white blood corpuscles. Last week the Japanese announced that the count of Hiroshima's dead had risen to 125,000.
I am completely unswayed by the argument that the bombing saved American lives by convincing the Japanese that their cause was hopeless. If that were true, why not bomb a nearby deserted atoll as a demonstration? Why bomb two cities over the course of several days? Why not pick a military target rather than a civilian center? This was an act of callous terrorism.
Still arguing? Go watch this fabulous dialog between AC Grayling and Christopher Hitchens, discussing Grayling's book, Among the Dead Cities. Grayling makes the same argument I do, that the bombing of civilians was immoral and to little material effect. The surprising thing, though, is that I expected Hitchens to go all militaristic, but he doesn't; he actually deplores the area bombing campaign. He draws a stronger conclusion — he thinks the complete and unambiguous defeat of Nazi Germany was necessary to allow rebuilding of the country, but he thinks the attempts to destroy the German culture with devastating firebombing was not a rightful act.
Comments
Posted by: jennie.erwin
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August 6, 2010 9:46 AM
Sadly I think it's one of many acts of terrorism history will judge us harshly on.
Posted by: Ray Moscow
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August 6, 2010 9:47 AM
I can tell you that visiting the Hiroshima peace museum forever changed my view of nuclear weapons.
I agree with there having being other options besides nuking a civilian city -- oh, make that two -- to end the war.
Posted by: dreamstretch
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August 6, 2010 9:50 AM
It was a warning to Stalin.
Posted by: vanharris
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August 6, 2010 9:50 AM
PZ, maybe peoples's attitudes had been hardened by years of exposure to atrocities?, & then there was Pearl Harbor.
But it was still appalling. War always has been, & carrying it to the citizenry ain't something new. I mean, there are Biblical injunctions to do just that.
Posted by: duras
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August 6, 2010 9:52 AM
Why didn't the Japanese surrender after the first bomb? I think it shows how insane their resolve was, that after having an entire city destroyed by one bomb they continued the war.
However, I do know a little bit about history. I know very soon after the bombs were dropped, Russia had agreed to join the war in Japan. So it seems like we dropped the bombs as more of a demonstration to Russia that we're not to be screwed with.
Posted by: Sajanas
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August 6, 2010 9:55 AM
I'm not sure it is ever entirely excusable, but there are reasons for using them.
The Japanese had heavily decentralized factory systems, often working out of the houses of various families. The Germans, by contrast had huge, heavily defended factories which were separate from the civilian population. So, while there could have been some more proper military targets, I think they were all pretty meshed with the civilian structure at the time, though Hiroshima was a particularly unfortunate example, since it was (I believe) left unbombed because of its cultural importance.
The battle for Okinawa resulted in immense civilian and military casualties because the Japanese used civilian towns as part of their defense. The US completely expected a repeat on a huge scale for the invasion of Japan itself, with a fight to the last man for the whole country.
Having an enemy that refuses to surrender, fights to the last man, and is willing to use its own civilians as shield, I'm not sure what a better alternative would have been. Using the bombs on these cities cost lives, but I think that their level of destruction was enough to make the Japanese leadership realize that they were not going to get annihilated from the air, and that further resistance would have been pointless. When you consider that a similar conventional bombing of Tokyo killed similar amounts of people as Hiroshima or Nagasaki, yet left the Japanese continuing the war, I really don't know. Also, at the time we really only had those two bombs too. I guess a test fire would have been better, but the impression of a large number of those might have been important too.
Posted by: nigelTheBold, Minister of Spankings
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August 6, 2010 9:56 AM
True. But at least Pearl Harbor was a military target.
That doesn't change the fact that we bombed the living fuck out of two civilian cities. In fact, if that was the point, it makes the act even worse. That means the point wasn't about stopping Japan. That means we bombed two cities that were doubly-innocent.
Posted by: oihorse
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August 6, 2010 9:57 AM
Given the reports of the severity of the fighting by soldiers and civilians who were there in the Pacific theater the Armchair Generaling on this one is laughable.
It's a bit too easy to sit back and say, "Nope shouldn't have done that."
Posted by: vbalbert
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August 6, 2010 10:01 AM
Of course it was an act of terrorism. So was the attack on Pearl Harbor, the invasion of Poland, the V1 and V2 attacks on England and the firebombing of Dresden. War is nothing but terrorism. But in defense of dropping the bombs, I don't think anybody really know what the fallout (both literal and figurative) would be. I don't excuse it, but in a way it's like playing with matches and finding out that buildings with people in them can burn to the ground. I think the resulting horror of those attacks have prevented any other nuclear attacks. So far. Unfortunately, Iran wants to make these.
Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/YBP.JNw_xss75AcP0zKfDfeo7H__0lNymxFVEodmvA--#cd85e
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August 6, 2010 10:03 AM
Would you like to learn about extra-terrestrials?
Place a small team at the exit to the Hiroshima Peace Museum that will quietly take away and question anybody who leaves without tears in their eyes.
Anyone that comes out of that complex without tears is not human.
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 10:03 AM
As was much of the allied bombing of both Europe and Japan - the bomber Harris mentality was apparently rife throughout the military - the choice of targets was merely an extention of the tactics already being used - the rot goes beyond Nagasaki and Hiroshima although they obviously illustrate the perfection of the strategy of murdering civilians unneccessarily in an attempt to win wars.
Posted by: Doug
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August 6, 2010 10:03 AM
I went through a period of being very interested in WWII history, and I've always been very conflicted about whether or not dropping the bombs was the right thing to do. I like to think that dropping it on some neutral, uninhabited place would have convinced the Japanese to quit, but we can't forget that for a year (and more) prior to the attack, major Japanese cities were undergoing one of the most horrific firebombing campaigns in history. These raids killed far more people than the atomic attacks did, and I imagine they died just as horribly. Through all of that, the Japanese Imperial command simply refused to consider surrender. I don't think it's necessarily wrong to condemn Truman and the US for the bomb, but at least an equal share of the blame should fall on the Japanese government, who callously refused to act to save their vulnerable population. Hell, they even refused to DEFEND their cities against air raids. The moral historical narrative of WWII tends to focus on Germany and the holocaust, but the actions of Japan in China and Korea (and other places in the Pacific) were every bit as brtual and genocidal, and evil. Is matching evil with evil morally justifiable? I don't know. Did the bomb save lives? There is no way to know. I'm just glad I didn't have to make that decision.
Posted by: Vyapada
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August 6, 2010 10:04 AM
Potentially over 200 000 were killed in these bombings, many of who were civilians. However, this pales in comparison to the number of civilian casualties on either side throughout the course of the war... also there were military targets in both cities, so it wasn't only a civilian target.
I don't agree with trading numbers as the means of determining what is or is not a terrorist attack (and the mobilisation of civilian society to support the war effort blurs the lines too) but I don't think it's an entirely clear cut issue...
Posted by: davej
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August 6, 2010 10:04 AM
We only had two bombs. We knew that suicide was one of the primary traditions of the Samurai and the Bushido code which defined the Japanese military thinking. It was probably decided that the remaining military was too well dispersed to make a decent target.
Posted by: cervantes
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August 6, 2010 10:06 AM
The real audience for the nukings was not Japan -- indeed the U.S. could have bombed an uninhabited area, or the ocean. The act was directed at the Soviet Union, to let them know the U.S. was willing to use its nuclear weapons. Truman feared that they intended to move on Japan.
Posted by: Dyolf Knip
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August 6, 2010 10:06 AM
The bombing of Tokyo in March of 1945 destroyed a quarter of city, killing almost as many people as in Hiroshima. Only 4% of the B-29 bombers involved were lost. The Allies had conclusively demonstrated that they could effectively destroy Japanese cities at will, even without nuclear weapons. And still they refused to surrender. Instead, they drew up plans for resisting an invasion force that involved, among other things, handing their own civilians some sharpened bamboo poles and telling them to charge American machine guns on the beaches.
On the other hand, the Japanese had never intended to actually beat the Allies; their plans were pretty much always geared around making a victory too costly. The demonstration that their cities could now be wiped out with apparent ease, by one plane dropping one bomb, put that line of reasoning into the trash bin in a fairly blatant and hard to ignore way. Possibly an atoll bombing would have done the job.
On the gripping hand, apparently even the nuclear bombings still weren't convincing enough, as the Japanese High Command was still insisting on terms, and it wasn't until the Soviet declaration of war on the 9th before Hirohito considered the unconditional surrender the Allies demanded. And even then, he was still admitting that he would _not_ surrender if the kokutai (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kokutai) would not be preserved (i.e., him at the top). And _even then_, there was an attempted coup by members of the military a few days later.
Posted by: jrsutter
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August 6, 2010 10:07 AM
I do not think of Germans as evil. How history judges the actions is largely irrelevant to me today.
We know the actions were a success. Lots of people died horrible deaths, but none Americans. Almost certainly more would have died if the war had not been ended there.
When people today say there were other choices, what would those be? Do you really believe if a desolate area had been bombed it would have acted as deterrent? The Japanese could still fight. They did not surrender after one of their cities was bombed. They were willing to continue. Unless my understanding of the events is incorrect lies written by the victors, I don't get this logic.
The attacks were horrible. It is not fair to those who had to die and suffer. It would not have been fair to anyone.
Still, if you asked anyone at the time if they wanted that or a Rape of
NankingPhiladelphia, what do you think they would say?So easy to judge while safe and removed.
I'm not saying it was a good thing or even the best course of action. I don't know, but I can't imagine how anyone could say there were other choices when it is so likely the death toll would have been far greater.
Posted by: Anubis Bloodsin the third
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August 6, 2010 10:12 AM
Japan was militarily screwed by the time the bombs were dropped, they were no longer a threat to world peace, their navy was sunk their air-force decimated and the country was starting to starve.
The bombs was just a 'friendly' warning to Russia to back off!
That was the only point they had, American politicians were more spooked and afeared by Russia and the spectre of communism then the war with Japan, the dogma of ending the war early and thereby saving lives was just a handy cover.
Consider the post 'bomb' history of American foreign policy, they were commie haters, still are!
Posted by: cafink
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August 6, 2010 10:12 AM
According to world-war-2.info, “ Hiroshima was a city of considerable military importance. It contained the 2nd Army Headquarters, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan. The city was a communications center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops.”
And “Nagasaki had been one of the largest sea ports in southern Japan and was of great war-time importance because of its many and varied industries, including the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials.”
Posted by: shelley.just
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August 6, 2010 10:14 AM
Before the dropping of the atom bombs, Allied planes were firebombing Japan. Tokyo was virtually destroyed by a firebombing attack in February, 1945. This attack killed over 100,000 and it was only one bombing. Between 1942 and 1945, we killed over half a million Japanese with our bombings--many of the people burned badly and dying slowing.
More people in Japan were killed, horribly, by fire and other "strategic" bombing, than both atom blasts, combined.
War is hell. War is inhumanity. War is barbarism. When man wages war, man is an animal: vicious, unthinking, cold, and deadly. Did you think other methods of waging war were more pretty? More honorable?
None of us really knows if the Japanese would have capitulated if we just continued the firebombing. I do know just as many Japanese would have died. But I guess if they didn't die from atomic blasts, but were burned alive via firebombing that would have been "OK".
I also wonder: if we didn't have the horror of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in front of us in the decades that followed, would we have waged atomic war on another front? In another battle? Perhaps over Cuba, or Germany, or Poland? When millions would have died, because we were so much more adept at building atomic weapons, and so many more people had them?
That's another thing we'll, thankfully, hopefully, never know.
Posted by: Gordy
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August 6, 2010 10:15 AM
It has been suggested that the U.S. wanted to test the nuclear bombs, and used Japanese cities and the people living in them to do so. A woman whose father survived the bombing had this to say:
"I know that the US came to my father's school and did health examinations regularly and researched the effects and then developed more atomic bombs.
I know that the reasons why the US dropped two different kinds of bombs in two different cities was that America wanted to know the effects by examining them and to exercise its dominance and power after the war."
That would certainly explain why Hiroshima had not been bombed prior to the nuclear attack. If it was a legitimate target, why not? Think about that.
Her story as told to the BBC is here : http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/witness/august/9/newsid_4720000/4720807.stm
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 10:17 AM
Wait 3 days? (assuming blockquote 2 is well sourced)
Posted by: fishyfred
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August 6, 2010 10:18 AM
Posted by: MrFire
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August 6, 2010 10:18 AM
Nuke apologist trolls are already here. Interesting breed.
Posted by: viggen
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August 6, 2010 10:19 AM
Umm, you're kidding me right? WWII was a five year long string of terror bombing: that's what they called it, showering civilian centers with bombs was called terror bombing. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are nothing new in that regard, just a repeat of the same tactic with a new kind of weapon. If you want to complain about a particular amorality of hurting people, you might want to look at a corner of history that is not so very replete with examples like this one committed by so many different governments. I would point out to you that very likely another war like WWII has not be fought because of Hiroshima and Nagasaki... no war since has been even vaguely at the scale of horror of WWII and I'm completely fine with that. Yeah, these smaller wars are bad, but they are definitely not WWII.
Posted by: Hydrogenman
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August 6, 2010 10:20 AM
I think just simply calling it an act of terrorism is unnecessarily simplistic.
Posted by: locka99
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August 6, 2010 10:21 AM
I'm not surprised at all they dropped the bomb. Japan was clearly beaten but the invasion of Okinawa was a hellish experience. The invasion of mainland Japan was likely to be far worse with military and civilian casualties WAY in excess of a few atomic bombs. Aside from the war on the ground, the geopolitical situation has to be considered too. With the war nearly over Russia was keen to "help" with Japan and could easily have decided to go after Europe too. There is no doubt that blowing up an atom bomb over a live population demonstrated US resolve in no uncertain terms.
Posted by: Wholly Cymbal
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August 6, 2010 10:21 AM
Damn. Fucking. Straight.
Posted by: iiandyiiii#0fab0
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August 6, 2010 10:27 AM
I agree with the other "Nuke apologist trolls" that it's not so clear cut. From what I've read (and my experience in the Navy), if we had not dropped those bombs the war would have continued. Japan would not have surrendered. The US would have invaded mainland Japan, which had already shown it was willing to use every last man, woman, and child to fight. Hundreds of thousands of US troops would probably have died, and MILLIONS of Japanese people.
Can I guarantee that this was the way it would have gone? No, but I think it is the most likely set of events. In light of that, I do not judge Truman too harshly for the decisions he made. War is hell, and there are situations where the only choices are bad ones. Kill 300,000 for sure, now? Or risk 5 million deaths over the next year? Or give Japan the conditional surrender they want, and allow them to rebuild, possibly to wage war again?
Which choice is best? I don't know. It could have gone much worse.
Posted by: Frankencone
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August 6, 2010 10:28 AM
Behold, probably the greatest act of terrorism to ever go down in history. I can only hope that humanity got all of its evil out during World War Two.
Posted by: https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawkYaU2mqAkf9EtKy1VPdBJjRlL0gv9TBac
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August 6, 2010 10:28 AM
Dantooine is too remote to make an effective demonstration.
Posted by: kevin.vanhaaren.net
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August 6, 2010 10:29 AM
Although the loss of life was terrible, I think these bombs, and where they were dropped were a necessity.
I am not unbiased -- My father (a kid at the time) and his family, dutch colonialists in Indonesia, were held in Japanese concentration camps during the war. My grandfather and 2 of my uncles were killed in Japanese mines doing slave labor for the Japanese. One of my uncles that survived saw the mushroom cloud of Nagasaki from where he was working.
Altough the writing was on the wall for the Japanese by this time, it had all the appearances of being a war of attrition that would put WWI to shame. The war in the pacific with its island hopping beachfront after beachfront had already shown it's terrible cost.
I also think there was one other important reason this had to happen -- I think it's the primary reason we haven't gotten into a nuclear war. It showed the true terrible costs. A demonstration wouldn't have the same emotional impact (who talks about Bikini Atoll these days?) Somebody, somewhere was going to drop this on a city. Was it better for it to be the 1st two developed (and weakest) bombs developed rather than a more powerful one later on? We'll never know, but I'm convinced that once the true impact of what they could do was seen, everyone decided to back off on actual use (didn't prevent the insanity of the arms race, but at least that didn't develop into a nuclear war.)
Posted by: msironen
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August 6, 2010 10:30 AM
Japan's military industry were in the middle of their cities and they had their civilians working in them; in other words waging a "total war". It's basically next to using the civilian population as both human shield and labor.
Also, as predicted, the Japanese high command tried to explain away the bombing of Hiroshima as some kind of unprecedented natural disaster, which is why the decision to drop two bombs was made.
To claim that bombing some "nearby uninhabited atoll" would've had the same effect seems wishful thinking at best. It might have convinced the Japanese that US had the means of destroying cities in an instant; it most likely wouldn't have convinced anyone that the US also had the resolve to use them on a real target.
Sure, the bombings were a terrible chapter in history. Just don't claim that invading Japan's main islands would've been somehow more preferable from any point of view; the civilian cost would've been many times as high even without considering any military viewpoints.
The only "humane alternative" worthy would've perhaps been to forget a quick victory and blockade Japan. This of course would've let the Japanese rebuild their military (since conventional bombing of their industry was just as damaging as evidenced by the Tokyo fire bombings) and commit further atrocities against the Chinese, Koreans and other Pacific populations under their rule.
Posted by: MrFire
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August 6, 2010 10:30 AM
I challenge anyone to come up with a clearly-defined, overwhelmingly urgent reason why vaporizing 100,000 innocent civilians is in any way justifiable.
Posted by: Shnakepup
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August 6, 2010 10:30 AM
What is your definition of "troll"? It seems that word is thrown around too much nowadays, equating to "someone who disagrees".
I always thought trolls were people who intentionally disrupt discussions, and/or bait people with inflammatory statements. The few so-called "nuke apologists" I've seen in this thread don't seem to fit that. Is it that hard to accept that maybe someone has a differing opinion than you, and to actually, you know, discuss it? God forbid you actually engage their ideas, rather than dismissing them with a "troll" label.
/rant
Posted by: Dave Dell
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August 6, 2010 10:31 AM
shelley.just
I think you are correct. A lesser use of the atomic weapons might have accomplished the same purpose. I, too, feel a restrained use of this weapon might have legitimized its future use.
Posted by: Dahan
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August 6, 2010 10:31 AM
For a year or so I lived about 20 minutes by train from Hiroshima. I've been to Peace Park many times and have rung the bell.
It's a very strange feeling to stand in a place where tens of thousands of people were vaporized or killed in other ways by one act. It's hard to put into words.
Posted by: Shplane, some shit in french
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August 6, 2010 10:32 AM
I think you're missing the forest for the trees, PZ. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a minuscule fraction of the death caused by World War 2. The entire thing was horrible and monstrous, and singling out this tiny bit as somehow worse than any of the other options available seems foolish.
Would a year of slaughtering our way through Japan have been any better?
Posted by: nicoaltiva
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August 6, 2010 10:32 AM
vbalbert wrote: Of course it was an act of terrorism. So was the attack on Pearl Harbor,
Nope, it was an act of war, and a crime against peace by modern definition, but not terrorism.
the invasion of Poland,
Again, a crime against peace, but not terrorism by any stretch of the imagination.
the V1 and V2 attacks on England and the firebombing of Dresden.
Both war crimes, but calling them terrorism is simply idiotic.
"Terrorism" is not a synonym for "bad," you know. Ever seen a dictionary? It's kinda big. That's because there's plenty of words to choose from. Get yourself a thesaurus.
Posted by: Erunafailaro
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August 6, 2010 10:32 AM
That's true. But today, no American can be blamed for this act of terrorism. You cannot be held guilty for a crime that was commited by someone else before you were born.
However, it's your responsibility that this will never happen again.
Posted by: Dahan
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August 6, 2010 10:34 AM
Evil can always be justified... as some commentators here are showing us.
Posted by: msironen
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August 6, 2010 10:40 AM
Because by doing so a far more costlier invasion (by any which way you want to measure it) was avoided.
Simple and clear enough?
The battle for Okinawa claimed as many as 100000 civilian casualties as well. Does the death of tens of thousands of soldiers somehow offset the deaths of the civilians, or does the fact that the dying happened over much longer period of time make it somehow a lesser evil?
Posted by: Sonja
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August 6, 2010 10:40 AM
I want to take this opportunity to acknowledge the work during the 1980's of the Nuclear Weapons Freeze movement -- almost completely forgotten today by people under 40 years old, the Freeze at one time had one million people marching in NYC to stop the insanity of the nuclear arms race.
The most successful accomplishment of the Freeze movement was to educate and change people's views about nuclear weapons. Before the Freeze, people believed it was possible to wage or win a nuclear war. They also believe that having more nuclear weapons made the U.S. safer and that increased spending on new weapons was a good idea for national security.
This change in national sentiment made it impossible for the US military to use tactical (small, Hiroshima-sized bombs) nuclear weapons in places like Iraq. The trend in the 1980's was to build new types of nuclear weapons designed for specific war-fighting purposes. (I understand the military has replaced the mission designed for these tactical nukes with other horrific conventional weapons such as fuel air exposives and bunker-buster bombs, but it is still a victory that a grassroots movement could completely change the public's view of nukes.)
President Barack Obama, very quietly and without ceremony, put an end to production and deployment of new nuclear weapons this year as part of an overhaul of US nuclear policy (a nuclear freeze). Having read his college newspaper article written in the early 80s about the nuclear freeze movement, I'd like to think he was very pleased that he could make this come to pass with the swish of a pen when millions marching could not.
Posted by: oihorse
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August 6, 2010 10:40 AM
@MrFire
Please tell us how the war could have been won at that point with less loss of life. Should be easy for you with all that hindsight.
Posted by: vbalbert
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August 6, 2010 10:42 AM
nicoaltiva:
From www.tfd.com/terrorism:
The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.
and
(Government, Politics & Diplomacy) systematic use of violence and intimidation to achieve some goal
and
a method of government or of resisting government involving domination or coercion by various forms of intimidation, as bombing or kidnapping.
How are those definitions any different than war?
Posted by: Abhilash Nambiar
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August 6, 2010 10:45 AM
I thought I would use some numbers to put things in perspective. I am not making a comment on good and evil here. Rather I hope the numbers will allow people to make better judgment on this matter. I am using low end estimates.
Hiroshima bombing casualties - 70,000
Nagasaki bombing casualties – 40,000
Tokyo fire bombing - 88,000
Nanking Massacre – 150,000
I added the Nanking Massacre because it was committed by the Japanese. Feel free to shove it on the face of any Japanese who try to look self-righteous because of Hiroshima.
Also note that conventional weapons had then and continue to now kill more people than nuclear weapons. The anti-nuclear crowd has not got to the root of the issue. That is for sure.
Posted by: Grumpy1942
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August 6, 2010 10:45 AM
Monday morning quarterbacking.
Posted by: msironen
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August 6, 2010 10:45 AM
It's seems rather strange how people making rational arguments as to why the bombings were the least of available evils (aside from basically giving up) are labeled as "trolls" by people can't come up with anything except pure emotion and well, calling the other side trolls.
Posted by: whistlepete
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August 6, 2010 10:47 AM
The Japanese would have surrendered, just not unconditionally like the Allies demanded. I think that after having put so many resources into the making of the bomb there wasn't any way we weren't going to use it. Apparently Trinity wasn't good enough, we had to see how the bomb would affect a populated area. Our leaders apparently also wanted to show Stalin how big their dicks were. It was needless murdering of mostly innocent civilians.
Posted by: charley
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August 6, 2010 10:48 AM
We should have at least tried bombing a deserted area first as a demonstration. It might have worked.
Posted by: Gordy
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August 6, 2010 10:48 AM
So many people here trying to justify this:
As far as I'm concerned, there is no reasonable justification for that. How would you feel if an American city had been subjected to a similar attack?
Posted by: Petzl
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August 6, 2010 10:50 AM
PZ's right. It wouldve been more humane for the war to have gone on an extra year or so with its attendant 5 million japanese fatalities and 1 million US fatalities.
And, by the way, the conventional non-nuclear carpet- and fire-bombing of Germany and Japan is OK, even though it caused more casualties than a nuclear bomb, is just fine.
Posted by: ThatOtherGuy
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August 6, 2010 10:51 AM
I'm trying to remember what the quote was and where it was from... something like "you have to convince the other crazy guy that you're even crazier than he is." I think it was Lewis Black, talking about electing a dead president. Only way to beat the crazy guys (supposedly resorting to civilian suicide attacks when you reach their shores) is to scare them into submission by being even crazier (annihilating an entire city of innocent people).
Posted by: Nelson M.
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August 6, 2010 10:51 AM
This morning on the radio, during my drive to work, there was an interview with a Hiroshima survivor. I believe it was a re-broadcast of a BBC World news show. It was brief, and touching. The survivor took the interviewer to the place where she stood -- or rather, lay on the ground -- when the bomb hit.
Posted by: smith.pelican
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August 6, 2010 10:52 AM
I recommend reading "Flyboys" by James Bradley for a well written account of the bombing of Japan. He also ties it into a story about a group of flyers lost on Chichi Jima Island. In the book General Curtis LeMay says he fully expected to tried as a war criminal had the United States lost the war. Wholesale firebombing of civilian populations was a new tactic first used in WWII. On the other side, Japan certainly needs to account for thier atrocities which, in this book, are more inhuman and vicious than the Nazis.
Posted by: sadpanda
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August 6, 2010 10:53 AM
Physicist Freeman Dyson makes a good argument that the bombs did not greatly influence the decision of Japan to surrender to the USA.
See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4B3aNKVspM#t=20m13s
Posted by: andrew h
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August 6, 2010 10:53 AM
agree with previous commenters noting that war is nothing /but/ terrorism. at the same time, the notion that terrorism is an absolute wrong is worth considering, though few westerners want to do it. if you perceive that terrorism is the only way to accomplish your goals (e.g. crushing an enemy who won't stop fighting you), should you hold back and keep up the ordinary fight? should the US have landed 400,000 troops in japan and done to the japanese what the russians did to germany, with the massacre and mass rape of its civilians?
it's a choice between two evil things. neither would history have judged us kindly for invading and laying waste, manually, to japan.
Posted by: nicoaltiva
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August 6, 2010 10:53 AM
@vbalbert: with that kind of reasoning you could argue that submarines are a form of fish.
Posted by: Kurt1
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August 6, 2010 10:54 AM
Interesting, a friend of mine wrote his bachelor thesis about this, and I had the pleasure of reading it last year.
Two facts are interesting in particular:
First: there was one order to drop both bombs.
And second: the japanese government had allready surrenderd. They had only two conditions: First to keep the tennô (Emperor of Japan), and second not to call it surrender without conditions, so that they could keep their dignity. The US government rejected these conditions, dropped the bombs and afterwards accepted them without changes.
Sad but true, if you have a big, new gun, you want to shoot it.
Posted by: vbalbert
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August 6, 2010 10:55 AM
charley: We had only two bombs at the time. The decision on where to bomb was to be as effective as possible.
Posted by: whistlepete
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August 6, 2010 10:56 AM
I just finished Richard Rhodes book, The Making of the Atomic Bomb, a month or so ago, it was one of the best books I have ever read. Anyone interested in the history of the bomb should check it out.
Posted by: MrFire
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August 6, 2010 10:57 AM
Ok, I'll retract the troll label. I'm just annoyed at what I see as the unconscious callousness of otherwise presumably intelligent people. It is inconceivable to me to do anything other than condemn this atrocity on the strongest possible terms. I am not remotely averse to examining the historical consequences of the event, but we seem to going beyond that, and looking for silver linings in it. This to me nothing more than us trying to assuage our guilt, and is something that I find to be the worst possible type of retrospective 'ends justify the means' argument.
Posted by: Gordy
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August 6, 2010 10:58 AM
Well said, Kurt1 @ #59. That's my understanding of what happened too.
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 11:00 AM
How is that idiotic? Because it wasn't muslims doing it or what? I'd agree that Pearl Harbor wasn't terrorism, it was an act of war with one military force attacking another. I'd agree that the invasion of Poland wasn't terrorism, again, an act of war. But bombing civilians to reduce morale by inspiring terror categorically is terrorism. We're not discussing collateral damage here, we're discussing attacks specifically targetted at civilians specifically to induce a state of fear.
Posted by: MosesZD
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August 6, 2010 11:00 AM
What an ignorant and paranoid woman. We had two bomb designs because nobody was sure if the Nagasaki bomb design would actually work (that design was tested at Trinity, but it was also considered to be much more likely to fail due to the implosion method of detonation). Thus, to avoid the problems of a "single point of failure" we developed the two bombs in tandem.
We also continued to develop atomic weaponry. Which was not related, at least directly, to finding out the effects (and developing treatments) of radiation in a potential atomic exchange with some other nuclear country.
Posted by: Orac
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August 6, 2010 11:00 AM
As the Sb resident WWII buff, I would be remiss if I didn't pimp something I wrote five years ago, on the 60th anniversary of the bombing:
http://oracknows.blogspot.com/2005/08/60-years-ago-today-hiroshima.html
Posted by: Aaron Baker
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August 6, 2010 11:01 AM
Kurt1,
I think your friend was wrong on both counts. For a good recent treatment of these events, see Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms. I'm at work, or I'd look up the relevant page numbers.
Posted by: MrFire
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August 6, 2010 11:03 AM
False dichotomy, idiot. Some have already gone to the trouble of saying that at the very least, a nuke could have been detonated in an isolated area as a deterrent. Your worst-case scenario logic is an utterly lazy excuse.
Posted by: Sonja
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August 6, 2010 11:04 AM
I'm sure Lewis Black was paraphrasing Nixon's "Madman" theory. Nixon wanted to convince the North Vietnamese that he was crazy enough to use nuclear weapons in order for the threat to be convincing.Posted by: broboxley OT
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August 6, 2010 11:05 AM
Mr Fire #34
science project.With the sustained war to date the american public and soldiers were sick of dying in droves along with everyone else. We were firebombing tokyo and dresden. We had a new technology that could possibly take out a city with low deliverable costs. The decision was made to use the new weapon and measure its effectiveness. Worked beyond anyone's expectations and made damn sure that the folks of the time were well aware of what those effects were.
Posted by: Copyleft
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August 6, 2010 11:07 AM
Yes yes, we are all in awe of your skill at sarcasm.The sad fact is, your statement is correct. It WOULD have been more humane--and certainly more honorable, if such a concept has any place in warfare--to continue fighting soldier to soldier, attacking military targets, rather than vaporizing an entire city full of civilians.
That's what makes the Pearl Harbor attack an act of war, but the Hiroshima bombing an act of terrorism. Because attacking civilians is very different from attacking soldiers.
Posted by: msironen
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August 6, 2010 11:07 AM
I hope your friend remembered to include in his thesis that while some elements in the Japanese government were in fact in favor of ending the war before the bombings, the Japanese military leadership at the time wasn't having any of that (unfortunately, they also happened to be calling the shots in every sense). Hard to imagine how such a single-sided thesis would otherwise get a pass.
Posted by: hyman.rosen
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August 6, 2010 11:07 AM
Countries go to war as a whole. I don't believe that non-combatants should get to sit back and declare that they they must not be touched because they happen to not be holding weapons. (And yes, that would include attacks against our side as well.) It's not as if the Japanese army sprang into existence as a separate entity from the Japanese people.
It's fine to acknowledge and sorrow for the awful losses caused by war and by our nuclear attacks against Japan. But there's no need to apologize for them. The only way history will judge us badly is if people ignorant of history and circumstance get to rewrite it. Fortunately, there are enough "trolls" around so that isn't going to happen.
Posted by: piesquared88
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August 6, 2010 11:08 AM
The atomic bombs were by far not the worst crimes committed during that war, by either side. 125,000 dead is the latest estimate of the dead by Japan? Many died painful deaths by radiation sickness?
Just as many died in the firebombing of Tokyo, and I'd argue that burning is just as bad. And of course there should be no need to point out the millions of civilian deaths in China, or the atrocities being preformed on captured American soldiers while we waited for surrender.
As for bombing a remote atoll - today it's trivial to prove one has nuclear weapons. We have satellite specifically designed to watch for nuclear explosions, and given a little advance notice we could watch one in real time and high definition to see the exact scale of the blast and its effect on surrounding land. But this is WWII we're talking about. You get a radio'd description and *maybe* a bad video if you're lucky. It took the Japanese a day to verify that one of their cities was gone. How long would it have taken to verify that a remote island had been bombed, and by a single bomb? Unless you think you can convince a bunch of the Japanese high command to sit in a particular bunker at a particular date and time. And don't forget at this point we only *have* 3 bombs.
And even then? Read some of the accounts of the Japanese high command between the bombing and the surrender. They just barely decided to surrender even after we nuked two cities. And there was an attempted military coup that would have reversed the decision if successful. And if we'd failed to convince them to surrender (remember, we only had 3 bombs at this point so it's not like we could bomb a few islands and still use it on a city if that didn't work) it wouldn't be just *American* lives that were lost. The Japanese plan was to throw everything they had at the beaches if we invaded. Soldiers, civilians, children, whatever. In an attempt to reduce our morale by forcing us to slaughter half the population. And from the experiences we'd had on other islands we captured, it seemed the people would go along with it. In preparation for the invasion that never happened, we stamped out so many purple hearts that we still haven't used them all.
The only thing that could stop that invasion was convincing proof that we could and would destroy them without setting foot on the island, and nuking two cities almost wasn't enough.
So: killing a hundred thousand civilians probably counts as a war crime, but if so it's just one more on a huge stack - and by far not the single one I'd pick to complain about. It was also the quickest reasonably sure way to end the war, when most other ways would end with *more* civilians dead.
Posted by: leodad0899
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August 6, 2010 11:09 AM
I'm a french guy who happens to live in Hiroshima, where I work with the elderly.
Today, still, some of them bear the mark of the bomb.
Scar tissue on their arms, in their backs, their legs...
Some of them evolved some kind of cancer of course, leukemia most of the time.
And all of them have nightmares, and memories they would like to forget...
It's one thing to talk about it, and excuse it because "it had to be done".
But it's another thing to be over here and hear them talk about it.
It left so deep a mark that it still is the subject of many daily conversations.
Posted by: Gordy
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August 6, 2010 11:09 AM
@ MosesZD -
She wasn't talking about why the U.S. designed two different bombs, but why they used them. Read Kurt1's post #59.
And reading the words "ignorant and paranoid" to describe the child of a nuclear attack survivor made my stomach turn, literally. Words fail me...
Posted by: daveau
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August 6, 2010 11:10 AM
You're not going to get me to defend any killing as necessary, even in war. Even in a war that is considered "just".
Posted by: Kurt1
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August 6, 2010 11:10 AM
There wasn´t any ability to "aim" V1 and V2 at something. They just fired them. About 8000 people were killed by "Aggregat 4" (V2). In the making of these rockets, about 12000 forced laborers died.
Posted by: Signal
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August 6, 2010 11:11 AM
This was an act of callous terrorism.
One can surely question the bombings and the strategy employed, but to make this unequivocal and callous claim in light of what we know about the Japanese "defense" efforts and the likely cost of a mainland invasion is simply disgusting. How many Marines being primed for the invasion do you think agreed with you?
"Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare. We have used it in order to shorten the agony of war, in order to save the lives of thousands and thousands of young Americans."
Public Papers of the Presidents: Harry S Truman, p. 212 (1945).
Posted by: Susan
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August 6, 2010 11:11 AM
Visiting the various exhibits at the Harry Truman Presidential Library in Missouri (highly recommended), listening to his speeches and reading what he wrote on this, I became convinced that he made his final decision largely based on revenge on a people he didn't consider fully human. Not a good reason.
And, yes, vaporizing human beings is the very definition of terrorism.
Posted by: startlingmoniker
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August 6, 2010 11:13 AM
I used to have (hell, STILL have) nightmares about this. I can't comprehend anything worse. Still, I'm open to the possibility that this was the right choice at the time. I'm 32, and I'm happy to say that I've never been a soldier or anywhere near a war. Every battle I've ever seen has been on TV, and geographically remote. So it's hard to say "oh, this was totally wrong" even though my intellect and my emotions are completely repulsed.
I've always heard the excuse that the Japanese would have simply kept fighting. Having studied their history, I understand it. But I still wonder what would have happened if we'd just said "we're done" and left them their few rocky islands and gone home? Weren't they more or less economically decimated anyway? And, keeping in mind that I'm not a dummy or a troll, what the fuck were we even fighting for by that time?
Posted by: msironen
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August 6, 2010 11:14 AM
That's just sheer irrationality; or worse yet idiocy. Or do you by some heroic feat of wishful thinking conclude that civilian casualties would've been lower (compared to the bombings) in such a scenario?
Posted by: SQB (fuck death)
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August 6, 2010 11:14 AM
War is hell.
Period. Full stop.
Be it Dresden, Nanjing, Pearl Harbor, Buchenwald, Hiroshima, Dachau, Nagasaki or the V2's on London, the Second World War was hell.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki stand out as especially awe-inspiring (in the archaic sense of awe: dread, terror) since such complete destruction was achieved so... easily. A climax to a war that was already a symphony of destruction.
My mother, who as a young girl was interned in a Japanese camp in Tjideng, claims that there were plans to kill all internee in case of a defeat and that only the swift end of the war prevented this. If that's true, I owe my very existence to those bombs. Of course, if my mother had been killed in the war, I wouldn't have known. I wouldn't even have been around to know.
My guess is that there was not one single reason for dropping it. It was probably a myriad of reasons -- revenge for Pearl Harbor, eagerness in testing the new weapon, deterrence towards Russia and an opportunity and hope of ending the war -- that when added up, resulted in this decision being made. But then again, and I don't know how else to conclude this, war is hell.
Posted by: Wise Bass
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August 6, 2010 11:15 AM
How exactly would the Japanese know, and believe that the US was telling the truth? Remember that this was 1945.
There's also the fact that most Japanese cities had experienced heavy conventional bombing already. Without actually experiencing the nuclear bomb, they might have very well have shrugged off the warning - at which point, we'd just be bombing cities anyways.
Because the Japanese didn't surrender after the first strike.
The nature of the industrial and military set-up in Japan was that most of the military targets were intermeshed with civilian targets (like the city of Hiroshima).
No, it was an act that likely saved millions of lives, most of them Japanese. A U.S. amphibious landing and invasion of Japan would have been incredibly bloody and damaging.
Nobody is saying the bombings were a good thing. They were, however, a much, much better option than the alternative, which was to fight a bloody amphibious invasion that would have likely incurred more than a million U.S. casualties and at least several times that in Japanese deaths.
It was actually seen as a more humane type of war. The hope was that by using strategic bombing, you could wipe out an enemy's capability to fight quickly, and ultimately compel a surrender that much faster (saving countless lives in the process).
It turned out to be rather less than effective, partially because of misunderstandings of how to actually cripple factories by bombing, and partially because bombing itself was incredibly inaccurate (people taken precision weaponry, a development of the last 30 years, for granted).
Posted by: baldywilson
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August 6, 2010 11:16 AM
Hmm. Who would be so utterly insane as to declare that they shall fight for their homeland whatever the cost, thus justifying nuclear weapons? I mean, who said:
Oh, wait. That was be Winston Churchill. The only difference is that we happened to be on the side of the victors. All justification for Hiroshima and Nagasaki is simply the victors writing history. We had the Blitz spirit, but Germany failed to back down when we fire-bombed Dresden. We were resolute when our cities burned, but the Japanese were just mad.
The firebombing of Dresden was a terrorist act against the German people by the UK bomber command. The blitzkrieg bombings of London was a terrorist act against the British by the German high command. And the bombing of Tokyo by conventional weapons, and the bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima with nuclear weapons was a terrorist act.
It's not enough to say "war is hell". Yes, war is hell. But deliberately targeting civilians to instil terror in a population for political gain is the standard definition of terrorism.
Posted by: Copyleft
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August 6, 2010 11:16 AM
In that case, the 9/11 attackers did nothing wrong, and there's no such thing as terrorism.
Posted by: PZ Myers
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August 6, 2010 11:17 AM
The nuke apologists are being called trolls because they are not making rational arguments.
"war is hell, everyone was committing atrocities". Yeah, most of us figured out that two wrongs don't make a right when we were about 5.
"we were killing more people with the firebombings anyway". You've got to be kidding. Is anyone arguing that incinerating more civilians was the answer? Is anyone claiming that hundreds of thousands of deaths was ethical because we didn't use a nuke?
"it shortened the war". Right. Notice all the people saying thie Tokyo firebombing wasn't enough? The Japanese endured incredible suffering throughout the war. Killing more wasn't the answer. The demonstrable existence of a super weapon was persuasive to convince them that further resistance was futile. Killing: unnecessary.
"a demonstration wouldn't have been effective". How do you know? We didn't try it! If we had, and the Japanese had not surrendered, then the military would have been justified in hitting the Japanese homeland to prevent greater casualties in conventional war. That's the problem -- no effort was made to minimize Japanese civilian casualties. We had dehumanized them so much that vaporizing them wasn't seen as criminal.
"we did it as a demonstration to the Russians". Yes. We annihilated a few hundred thousand lives as a prelude to Cold War posturing. This is exactly what I'm complaining about. People were killed in a gesture to our fear of the commies. This does not excuse any-fucking-thing.
Posted by: texag98
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August 6, 2010 11:18 AM
It is far too easy to condemn the actions of others when you can sit safely in your office years later as a result of those actions.
Judging by the casualty reports of the island hopping campaign, the estimates for the main islands may have been optimistic. I do not rejoice in the fact we dropped those bombs, but I do realize they were a necessary evil. It demonstrated to the Japanese leadership we can systematically annihilate their population at a minimum risk to our own people. So, despite their willingness to fight to the last person, they could not win.
Also contrary to as it was earlier asserted, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were military targets.
Hiroshima was the headquarters for Second Army and Chugoku Regional Army. In addition, it was a major military depot.
Nagasaki was a heavy industry city, heavily involved in the production of military hardware plus its harbor was used as a port of call by the Japanese navy.
Posted by: KG
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August 6, 2010 11:18 AM
Andrew H.It's very unlikely this would have been necessary. The Japanese government was delaying surrender in hopes that terms could be negotiated through the USSR, with which they had a neutrality treaty. The USSR denounced the treaty and invaded Manchuria on 8th August 1945 - between the dropping of the two A-bombs. This had at least as much effect as the bombs in bringing about the surrender. After all, the Japanese had no way of knowing if there were more A-bombs ready (there weren't), and even without the A-bombs, conventional bombing had already caused massive damage and enormous casualties - the 1945 Tokyo firebombing had killed at least 97,000 people.
- MosesZDGood fucking grief. You're talking about a woman whose father had died in the bombing. Would you be calmly rational under those circumstances, you heartless piece of shit?
I'll be attending the local commemoration this evening. Paper lanterns set alight and floated down the river Dee, with brief speeches.
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 11:18 AM
Or wait three days for the Russian declaration of war which appears to have precipitated the unconditional surrender in a way that the bombings didn't.
Or maintain a state of siege until the country gives up of its own accord, not like they were gonna sneak out any time soon.
Posted by: charley
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August 6, 2010 11:19 AM
I find it hard to believe that the anticipated difference in effectiveness between
A) bombing one reef then one city
vs
B) bombing two cities
drove the decision to take to first bomb straight to Hiroshima. I think revenge and hatred is more likely.
Posted by: MrFire
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August 6, 2010 11:20 AM
Fuck you.
Unbelievable. Well, great to know that you're prepared to die horribly in the interests of being consistent.
Posted by: MosesZD
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August 6, 2010 11:22 AM
Way to dumb-down a potentially good conversation with knee-jerk bigotry, asshole.
Posted by: msironen
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August 6, 2010 11:23 AM
To play for the other team for a change, the best criticism against the bombing (to me) was the fact it was in fact Russia declaring war against Japan (couple days later) that probably contributed almost as much as the bombings to the ending of the war. Whether it would've been enough without the bombings is unfortunately something that will remain indeterminable.
Posted by: nigelTheBold, Minister of Spankings
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August 6, 2010 11:23 AM
Excellent. So we are in accord here.
It would be acceptable for Iraq to nuke Buffalo, NY, and Athens, GA, as long as it brought an early end to the war.
Posted by: https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawmjWLFpCTTvui1bJ0OF0BdSYDTlR8kdkRY
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August 6, 2010 11:24 AM
Susan Galleymore:
Rationalizing the Bombing of Hiroshima
Confronting a Mindset
Posted by: Kurt1
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August 6, 2010 11:25 AM
He did. I just wrote, what i remembered, it was about 45 pages long, unfortunately it is mostly in german.
@Aaron Baker (67): These two ideas are from Tsuyoshi Hasegawas "Racing the Enemy" (2005), when i remember correctly.
Posted by: Michelle R
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August 6, 2010 11:25 AM
The worst part? they had no idea what the fuck they were dealing with. Had Hirohito not surrendered, they would've started operation downfall in november. They would've dropped more bombs and then waited to send in ground troops... A WHOOPIN' 48 HOURS LATER. They would've killed their own soldiers with radiation!
I hope now they realize what kind of crazy weapon that thing is... Never again. You have to be senseless to keep these things in your basement. You don't deserve to be called a human when you do nuclear weapon research. Freaks.
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 11:25 AM
Woulda been interesting to see how that sentiment would play out should the Taliban set off a conventional, biological, chemical or nuclear weapon in say, Times Square. I'm gonna go with saying that'd be categorized as terrorism by all and sundry (and rightly so).
So yeah, what Mr Fire said in #92
Posted by: Copyleft
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August 6, 2010 11:26 AM
No more than the wishful thinking of the nuke apologists who so confidently assert "They NEVER would've surrendered, they were subhuman madmen that had to be put down" and "Continuing with coventional warfare would've cost TONS more civilian and military lives, guaranteed!"Anybody can construct alternate realities and make whatever they want happen in them.
I don't know how many more or less people would've died if we withheld from bombing those cities. But I DO know that bombing them was an act of terrorism against innocent civilians.
Posted by: Wise Bass
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August 6, 2010 11:27 AM
The "bomb an isolated atoll" idea, in particular, makes me laugh. What, is the US going to film the whole thing and mail it to the Japanese? Send them a telegram saying "Hey guys, we're totally testing this new bomb on this isolated island, send a ship to see it!"?
This was 1945.
Posted by: Alder
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August 6, 2010 11:28 AM
The Japanese government gave the US government a 350 year old bonsai tree that survived Hiroshima. The tree is on display at the National Arboretum in DC, and it's a gorgeous living work of art. I think it's one of the most moving things I've ever seen, as if it's saying, "We have survived and we forgive you".
Posted by: Dyolf Knip
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August 6, 2010 11:29 AM
> They had only two conditions: First to keep the tennô (Emperor of Japan), and second not to call it surrender without conditions, so that they could keep their dignity
The other way to look at that is, they refused to end fighting a massively destructive war that would have the effect of wiping their people off the face of the earth if it continued... because they didn't want to lose face?
Posted by: broboxley OT
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August 6, 2010 11:30 AM
@PZ #87 Ah, so you are looking for excuses then instead of the rationality of the people in charge at that time. That is going to be hard to provide.
So what is your excuse for the razing of Carthage? Was it your roman leanings or anti african cultural values? Or was it because all the bloody Berbers were less than human and they used elephants in battle?
Posted by: irenedelse
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August 6, 2010 11:30 AM
@ Copyleft #72: Fighting "soldier to soldier" to the last would have been more honorable, but "humane"? Think Iwo Jima or Okinawa... You will have to find another word here.
@ PZ #87: You are being a tad unjust, here. Not all those who argue against you here are trolls, nor do they all use stupid, callous or irrational arguments. Saying that other solutions than the use of the atom bomb could have been even worse, in the end, is not absurd. Pointing out the callous and irrational mentality of the Japanese high command is not arguing that it was OK to bomb their people since they were so crazy, it's a reminder that sometimes, there is no easy solution out of a nightmare.
Posted by: Bill Gascoyne
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August 6, 2010 11:31 AM
For my part, I have an incredibly biased view on this topic since my father was scheduled to be on the second wave into Japan, so if the war had not ended I likely wouldn't be here to debate the issue.
Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/Vq578As1uZTymhPLgMF5ZCFYQrs3bQ--#2786f
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August 6, 2010 11:34 AM
There is an obvious reason why bombing a deserted area as a demonstration wouldn't have caused the Japanese to surrender:
They didn't surrender after we "demonstrated" the bomb in Hiroshima.
Posted by: Wise Bass
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August 6, 2010 11:34 AM
No, they're claiming that without actually showing the power of the bomb firsthand, the Japanese government was likely to blow off the warning (and they did, before the bombs were used). Threatening to destroy a city wasn't exactly a major threat when the US had already effectively done a lot of that with conventional bombing.
After it was actually used twice. Read the above.
And how exactly are you going to fucking do a test shot to warn them in 1945, in a way that they'll actually believe you?
Film it and mail them the reel?
Invite them to see the bombing (in the middle of an active conflict)?
Posted by: uke
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August 6, 2010 11:36 AM
Uh hello, they friggin started it. What should we have done, surrender and hope they treat us nice?
Oh wait. That's what we're doing with the Religion Of Peace. Never mind. I guess we'll find out how that turns out, won't we?
Posted by: Sonja
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August 6, 2010 11:37 AM
Just to put some perspective on things, the Hiroshima bomb was a "tiny" 13 kiloton bomb. The H-bombs developed, tested, produced and deployed by the US and USSR in the 1950's - 1980's were massive, up to 50 megaton designs. Their purpose was mainly to deter a nuclear attack (mutual assured destruction).
To have a discussion and make the case that there really is no difference between conventional nuclear weapons because in WWII more people were killed with conventional weapons is to pretend that time stopped in 1945. Of course, even in 1945 people understood the implications of one bomb that could destroy an entire city.
Could we destroy a nation or the planet with conventional weapons? Maybe. But since 1945 we all live with the knowledge that with nuclear weapons it could happen and in an instant. The very fact that we use a term such as "conventional" weapons is an acknowledgement of the difference.
Posted by: Mike in Ontario, NY
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August 6, 2010 11:37 AM
I could never understand why the US didn't drop the first nuke in the proximity of Tokyo harbor, within sight of the imperial palace, as a demonstration and a warning. Or, for that matter, why the US didn't give the Japanese leadership a full week to come to terms with the reality of a new super-weapon. I think the military and civilian leadership in the US could, and should, have done better.
Posted by: Sonja
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August 6, 2010 11:40 AM
I had a political science professor who said he could understand and justify the Hiroshima bomb, but not the Nagasaki bomb, just 3 days later.
Posted by: a_ray_in_dilbert_space, OM, A little FUCKING ray of sunshine
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August 6, 2010 11:40 AM
On the subject of war, one can do worse that to consult the counsel of a warrior:
You cannot qualify war in harsher terms than I will. War is cruelty, and you cannot refine it; and those who brought war into our country deserve all the curses and maledictions a people can pour out. I know I had no hand in making this war, and I know I will make more sacrifices to-day than any of you to secure peace. But you cannot have peace and a division of our country. If the United States submits to a division now, it will not stop, but will go on until we reap the fate of Mexico, which is eternal war. The United States does and must assert its authority, wherever it once had power; for, if it relaxes one bit to pressure, it is gone, and I believe that such is the national feeling. This feeling assumes various shapes, but always comes back to that of Union. Once admit the Union, once more acknowledge the authority of the national Government, and, instead of devoting your houses and streets and roads to the dread uses of war, I and this army become at once your protectors and supporters, shielding you from danger, let it come from what quarter it may. I know that a few individuals cannot resist a torrent of error and passion, such as swept the South into rebellion, but you can point out, so that we may know those who desire a government, and those who insist on war and its desolation.
You might as well appeal against the thunder-storm as against these terrible hardships of war. They are inevitable, and the only way the people of Atlanta can hope once more to live in peace and quiet at home, is to stop the war, which can only be done by admitting that it began in error and is perpetuated in pride.
We don't want your Negroes, or your horses, or your lands, or any thing you have, but we do want and will have a just obedience to the laws of the United States. That we will have, and if it involved the destruction of your improvements, we cannot help it.
You have heretofore read public sentiment in your newspapers, that live by falsehood and excitement; and the quicker you seek for truth in other quarters, the better. I repeat then that, bu the original compact of government, the United States had certain rights in Georgia, which have never been relinquished and never will be; that the South began the war by seizing forts, arsenals, mints, custom-houses, etc., etc., long before Mr. Lincoln was installed, and before the South had one jot or title of provocation. I myself have seen in Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, and Mississippi, hundreds and thousands of women and children fleeing from your armies and desperadoes, hungry and with bleeding feet. In Memphis, Vicksburg, and Mississippi, we fed thousands and thousands of the families of rebel soldiers left on our hands, and whom we could not see starve. Now that war comes to you, you feel very different. You deprecate its horrors, but did not feel them when you sent car-loads of soldiers and ammunition, and moulded shells and shot, to carry war into Kentucky and Tennessee, to desolate the homes of hundreds and thousands of good people who only asked to live in peace at their old homes, and under the Government of their inheritance. But these comparisons are idle. I want peace, and believe it can only be reached through union and war, and I will ever conduct war with a view to perfect an early success.
But, my dear sirs, when peace does come, you may call on me for any thing. Then will I share with you the last cracker, and watch with you to shield your homes and families against danger from every quarter.
Now you must go, and take with you the old and feeble, feed and nurse them, and build for them, in more quiet places, proper habitations to shield them against the weather until the mad passions of men cool down, and allow the Union and peace once more to settle over your old homes in Atlanta. Yours in haste,
W.T. Sherman, Major-General commanding
War is always an admission of failure.
Posted by: msironen
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August 6, 2010 11:41 AM
@PZ:
"Yeah, most of us figured out that two wrongs don't make a right when we were about 5."
So why single out the bombings?
"Is anyone arguing that incinerating more civilians was the answer?"
No, but a lot of people seem to be arguing that the atomic bombings were somehow singularly the most atrocious thing done in the course of the war.
"The demonstrable existence of a super weapon was persuasive to convince them that further resistance was futile. Killing: unnecessary."
And you know this how?
"If we had, and the Japanese had not surrendered, then the military would have been justified in hitting the Japanese homeland to prevent greater casualties in conventional war."
So would bombing Hiroshima THEN have been justified? I'm not entirely convinced that most of those who now condemn the bombings unconditionally would actually consider them justified had such demonstration taken place.
Most of the Japanese military leadership didn't want to surrender even after the bombings, but they gave the Emperor enough impetus to finally override the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War.
For a very rationality based blog, there's a whole lot of wishful thinking going on right now.
Posted by: hyman.rosen
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August 6, 2010 11:42 AM
"Fuck you" is not an argument. I am not "prepared" to die horribly, but should that happen, I do not want my attackers categorized as being more evil than those who are attacking our soldiers. Ditto for the 9/11 attackers. The whole notion of taking special umbrage at attackers based on the techniques or targets used in their attacks is what has led us into the two endless wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. War decisions should be made in brutal calm for them to be at their most effective, not in histrionic anger. And sometimes those decisions will involve slaughtering non-combatants because that is the best way to achieve a desired outcome. Of course pacifists will never see it that way, which is why pacifists are not put in charge of fighting wars.
Posted by: vbalbert
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August 6, 2010 11:43 AM
nicoaltiva:
You haven't answered my question. How are the definitions I quoted not a definition of war?
Posted by: Brownian, Most Vicious & Petty of Pharyngulites
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August 6, 2010 11:43 AM
So, we can nuke George W. Bush for Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay?
Or does this reasoning only work when it's darkies in the bomb sites?
Posted by: Vicki, Chief Assistant to the Assistant Chief
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August 6, 2010 11:44 AM
I don't know what the right answer is. But if saying "we shouldn't have done it" is armchair quarterbacking, so is saying "we should have." None of the people here saying either was there to make the decision, and we are all working with information that Truman didn't have. He didn't know what the Japanese would do if he ordered the army to nuke a city; if he ordered them to nuke a less-inhabited target; or if he ordered them to wait. Nor did he actually know what Stalin, or anyone else outside Japan, would think if we did that.
"Monday-morning quarterbacking" as an accusation can easily mean "you don't ever get to point out that people made mistakes" or "how dare you disagree with me." The people who use it don't refrain from all criticism of others, as they would if they assumed that the person on the spot at the moment always knows best. In a weird way, it's an assumption that we live in the best of all possible worlds, that no choice could have been better than the one that was made.
FWIW (not much, at this date), I would assume that Stalin would expect any foreign leader to act in crazy ways, and do whatever they needed to keep power, because that's what he did. People, especially crazy people, judge the world by themselves: we're talking about a man who was paranoid enough to have most of his competent generals shot because he suspected them of wanting to displace him.
Posted by: Signal
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August 6, 2010 11:44 AM
102: The Japanese government gave the US government a 350 year old bonsai tree that survived Hiroshima. The tree is on display at the National Arboretum in DC, and it's a gorgeous living work of art. I think it's one of the most moving things I've ever seen, as if it's saying, "We have survived and we forgive you".
I'm sure the surviving crew of the Arizona and the families of the men who died on board are touched to have been forgiven.
Posted by: Mattir-ritated
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August 6, 2010 11:44 AM
The word terrorism is too ill-defined and emotionally-laden to be particularly useful in understanding the factors that went into the decision to use atomic weapons in WWII. The use of nuclear weapons on civilian populations was horrifying and caused untold amounts of human suffering. Many of the individuals who made or contributed to the decision to use them had both admirable and despicable motivations for doing so. I hope that nuclear weapons will never be used again.
OTOH, I am unwilling to second-guess the decisions of leaders who had just experienced 6 years in which more than 60 MILLION people had been killed and who thought that the invasion of the Japanese home islands was the only other alternative to nuclear weapons. I do not know if I would have made the same decision or not. I think it is more helpful at this point to condemn the role that religious indoctrination played in starting and continuing WWII, to offer care and compassion to the survivors of the nuclear attacks, and to work to make sure that these weapons are never used again (in part by working to eliminate religious indoctrination as a tool that can be used by warmongers).
For those of us who can't go to Hiroshima, there is a wonderful survivor of that attack in Washington, DC. The Yamaki pine is a bonsai that entered cultivation in 1625, was 2 miles from ground zero in Hiroshima when the bomb was detonated, and survived. It was donated to the National Bonsai Museum by the Yamaki family in 1976 and members of the family visit it regularly. I go see it several times a year - it is astonishingly moving.
Also (and probably more controversially), Paul Fussell's memoir, Doing Battle provides a horrifyingly interesting picture of the reality of war and argument for the use of nuclear weapons to end WWII. Not sure if it convinced me that the decision to use them was correct, but it did convince me that it was not necessarily incorrect.
/waffling nuke apology
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 11:45 AM
The other way to look at that is, they refused to end fighting a massively destructive war that would have the effect of wiping their people off the face of the earth if it continued... because they didn't want to lose face?
So what if they were? They were willing to surrender on a condition that the US had no problem with fulfilling...except that the US was willing to continue a massively destructive war and destroy as many cities as it could just because they wanted to humiliate their enemy as much as possible.
Posted by: christophe-thill.myopenid.com
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August 6, 2010 11:46 AM
I'm with you PZ. I hesitate about calling it a crime against humanity and a war crime. But it's definitely a crime. For me, it goes with the bombing of Coventry by Nazi Germany and the torching of Dresden by the Allies. A mass murder of civilians for strategic purposes. I don't see how it could not be called a crime.
Posted by: Wise Bass
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August 6, 2010 11:47 AM
Without destroying Tokyo harbor in the process?
Posted by: Kurt1
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August 6, 2010 11:49 AM
Dyolf Knip
Hard to understand, but yes, thats about how the thought (think). Either die and keep your honor, than live a life without.
The problem is not, that the US government rejected these conditions, but that they accepted after the bombing.
Hanson Baldwin a reporter for the New York Times wrote „We [the americans] are now branded with the sign of the beast.“ and „We were, therefore, twice guilty. We dropped the bomb at a time when Japan already was negotiating for an end of the war but before those negotiations could come to fruition. We demanded unconditional surrender, then dropped the bomb and accepted conditional surrender“ (Baldwin, quoted by BERNSTEIN 1976: 35)
Posted by: Givesgoodemail
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August 6, 2010 11:49 AM
The estimates for casualties for the proposed invasion of the Japanese home islands was 1 million Allied casualties, with twice that number of Japanese military and civilian deaths. Minimum.
Causing less than 10% of that projected death toll to put an end to the war seemed like a good deal to National Command Authority (President Truman). It likely would have to most of us.
Dropping bombs on people is an abhorrent thing, but so is war. We didn't start that war (we did our level best to stay out of it), but we by Bast surely finished it.
Posted by: Denis Robert
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August 6, 2010 11:50 AM
@duras: The Japanese had already sent word to the US that they were ready to surrender before the Nagasaki bomb was dropped. But the US refused to delay the bombing which was already planned, because of a bad weather forecast. The US has steadfastly refused to acknowledge the fact that they knew full well that the second bomb was unnecessary, because if they did it would amount to admitting the commission of a war crime. But there is more than enough documentary evidence to prove that the Japanese had made clear their intent to surrender.
Oh, and little tidbit, the timing of the second bomb was left to the discretion of a COLONEL (Colonel Tibbets). Not the President, not a general, but a simple COLONEL. This was obviously done in order to create deniability.
I personally see no difference between Nagasaki and the Gas Chambers. Of course, both can claim that they were in some way "necessary" for the war effort. But both are criminally, disgustingly wrong.
Posted by: SteveM
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August 6, 2010 11:51 AM
The more I read about the lack of any true military value of the bombs actually forcing Japan's surrender, the more I think it was purely a test of the bombs' true destructive power. Setting up a few sensors or carboard buildings out in the desert would have been inadequate for the military to really get a "feel" for what the capability of a nuclear weapon really is. They had to be dropped on a city, with people. Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been deliberately spared as targets of previous firebbombings to leave them as "test sites" for the two bombs. They had to drop both because they were very different designs. The military value was not in forcing the surrender, but in evaluating the bombs themselves. And then there's simply the racial hatred and vengence of the war that made it even conceivable to conduct such an horrific "experiment" on a living population, but at that point, to the Americans, the Japanese were not people, they were enemy.
Posted by: Aratina Cage
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August 6, 2010 11:52 AM
Another thing I strongly agree with you on, but I would go further and call it an act of genocide.
Posted by: Copyleft
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August 6, 2010 11:52 AM
Hyman Rosen
"I do not want my attackers categorized as being more evil than those who are attacking our soldiers."
Sorry, but they are. Civilian deaths are simply not equivalent to military deaths. Killing a soldier in a war is tragic; killing a civilian is unconscionable.
The word "terrorism" does exist, and it does have meaning.
Posted by: Ordeneus
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August 6, 2010 11:52 AM
I'm surprised at how well the "we would've lost sooo many had we invaded" meme survives. That's simply not true, the Japanese were more than ready to surrender before the atomic bombs were dropped. Most US military commanders have also stated quite clearly that the dropping of the two bombs had no material effect on the ending of the war:
"The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan." Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet.
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 11:53 AM
I'm sure the surviving crew of the Arizona and the families of the men who died on board are touched to have been forgiven.
The crew of the Arizona were members of the military. They were "legitimate" targets (if the deliberate killing of any human being can be called "legitimate") and were neither completely helpless nor without the knowledge that their position put them at risk for an attack. This is different from, say, a Hiroshima schoolchild.
Posted by: Wise Bass
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August 6, 2010 11:54 AM
Oh, and for anyone suggesting that the US just blockade the islands, keep in mind that the Japanese had a bad rice harvest in 1945.
So the options (from the perspectives of the actual decision-makers) were likely
1)Millions dead from an amphibious landing,
2)Millions dead from a blockade-induced famine,
OR
3)Hundreds of thousands dead, but maybe a chance of shocking the Japanese into surrender.
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 11:55 AM
So because plan A is shitty let's utilize plan B which is also utterly shitty.
And then watch as the war ends due to none of the above.
But then claim plan B ended the war.
The Japanese were defeated. They were negotiating surrender. In all likelihood no more lives would have had to be lost and the war would have ended in approximately the same timeframe.
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 11:56 AM
If the claim in this article is correct (and I'm not saying it is, considering the source), then the use of atomic bombs damn near made the surrender of Japan LESS likely and might have, but for sheer dumb luck, have forced a land invasion to occur.
Posted by: Ring Tailed Lemurian
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August 6, 2010 11:57 AM
This looks like the right place to recommend the masterpiece that is Grave of the Fireflies
- an animated Japanese film centering around the firebombing of Kobe.
Wiki -
Imho, they're right, and, although I haven't ever seen Schindler's List, I'm sure this is better :)
PS My father, who was fighting the Japanese in Burma and about to have to chase them home through the whole of SE Asia and China, always told me it was highly likely that I existed only because Truman dropped those bombs. He also told me that he thought dropping them was purely a political statement to the Soviets, and hence a crime. A crime for which he, his comrades, and all the POWs they liberated, would be forever grateful.
Posted by: MrFire
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August 6, 2010 11:58 AM
1. I retracted the troll label @62. That said, with some of the comments since, for example #73, I'm thinking of bringing it out again.
2. The nuke apologist label stands. Comment #13:
A clear attempt to downplay the atrocity by invoking something worse (at least in terms of numbers), and a total non-sequitur.
Comment #17:
Same deal. Potential bonus points for possibly insinuating that since none of the horrible deaths were American, that it wasn't that bad.
It is not incumbent upon me to discuss what might have been. You do not know any better than I do on that score, and don't pretend that you do. What actually happened - this atrocity - was utterly inexcusable.
Posted by: Steven Dunlap
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August 6, 2010 12:00 PM
@ duras (and others with this question)
First, Stalin agreed to invade Japan at the Yalta Conference. The Soviet invasion of Sakhalin Island happened right on schedule, the day that Stalin agreed to do so.
Second, the Japanese wanted to keep their emperor and recently disclosed documents indicate that communications through neutral diplomats showed the Japanese were willing to surrender as early as the Spring of 1945 if the U.S. would promise to let them keep their emperor. The political fallout of a conditional surrender would have been fierce for Truman. Truman did eventually agree to have the emperor retained but the surrender had to be unconditional. That decision had its roots in irrational behavior at our "side of the table", as much as at the Japanese side.
The bombing on Nagasaki is the even more questionable one. It happened too soon after Hiroshima. In the historical record there exists no explicit refusal to surrender that "triggered" the bombing. Therefore, it's not out of the question that once the Soviet Union did invade (as promised before the U.S. government was sure the bomb would actually work) that the bombings served as a demonstration for Stalin.
Posted by: Joffan
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August 6, 2010 12:00 PM
Well I'm disappointed that PZ is also preferring name-calling to discussion on this charged subject.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwtwo/nuclear_01.shtml
Examining the death toll at Hiroshima and Nagasaki outside the context of the death rate of the whole war is irrational. Saying that it saved American lives is almost incidental - hard as it may be for some to understand, this bombing saved millions of Japanese lives.
Posted by: Wise Bass
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August 6, 2010 12:01 PM
No, a faction of the Japanese government seriously considered conditional surrender. The military leadership - which effectively controlled the government - was not ready to surrender.
Posted by: Evolving Squid
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August 6, 2010 12:01 PM
>>Why bomb two cities
It is my understanding that the decision to bomb a second city had one major reason behind it:
To serve as an effective threat against the Japanese and deterrent against the Russians and any other force that might be considering rising up.
In August 1945, the US did not have many atomic weapons built. I've heard any number from just the two to a maximum of five. Intelligence agencies knew they didn't have many. The thinking was that if they just bombed one, an enemy might think that's all they had. But if they flattened two cities, it would demonstrate that they had some unknown number and could potentially continue the destruction at will.
The latter turned out to be a powerful motivator for the Japanese to surrender.
By way of comparison, the firebombing of Dresden and the bombing of Hamburg did damage and caused casualties comparable to either atomic bombing. The only real difference was that with atomic weapons, it could be done with one plane and one bomb instead of an entire air force.
Posted by: Dyolf Knip
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August 6, 2010 12:01 PM
#121
"My ego is more important than my enemy's life" is a common, if fairly repugnant sentiment.
"My ego is more important than my own life" certainly fits in with honor-obsessed societies like Imperial Japan. Laudable under some circumstances, but can yield weird results.
"My ego is more important than my life and the lives of everyone I hold dear and claim to protect" goes way beyond repugnant and well into suicidal, batshit insane territory.
What if they had demanded as a condition that at the surrender ceremony the Allies not include anyone taller than the average Japanese citizen, so as not to look weak and puny? And should all wear dresses and pink flowers in their hair (those that had hair, at any rate)? Yes, the US and the rest certainly _could_ accommodate such a request, and it's even not horrible next to the degradations of the war. But the Allies' refusal to acquiesce is far more rational than the Japanese' willingness to suffer millions of casualties in demanding them.
Posted by: synackaon.myopenid.com
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August 6, 2010 12:03 PM
I am sorry, but one thing I get real tired of is armchair quarterbacking.
In war, each side tries to keep as many of their own alive, with keeping the enemies civilians alive as a secondary priority.
It was estimated at the time that to invade the homeland would take hundreds of thousands with even greater casualties. It was also known that that Japanese seeded their factories and military targets among civilian populations as an attempt to use them as a shield.
The bombing was justified.
It is up to future generations to see that such a situation never arises again.
That is the take away.
If this is an infamous day, try telling it to the Chinese who survived the Rape of Nanking and the survivors of Pearl Harbor.
A sock in the mouth is the best you'd deserve for that anyways - I know, I got that one time. Then I realized that I was being judgmental, telling them what they already knew at the time and struggled with.
It is nice to live in a world where we feel free to criticize the deeds of generations passing, but for Darwin's sake, don't think that they didn't struggle with this too!
Posted by: msironen
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August 6, 2010 12:03 PM
@Denis Robert: I don't know where you're getting your information from and I know wikipedia isn't the most reliable reference, but would you care to refute, with said documentary evidence, the following claims in Hiroshima bombing:
Events of August 7–9:
"The Japanese government still did not react to the Potsdam Declaration. Emperor Hirohito, the government, and the war council were considering four conditions for surrender: the preservation of the kokutai (Imperial institution and national polity), assumption by the Imperial Headquarters of responsibility for disarmament and demobilization, no occupation of the Japanese Home Islands, Korea, or Formosa, and delegation of the punishment of war criminals to the Japanese government."
(that's some surrender)
Also,
"The senior leadership of the Japanese Army began preparations to impose martial law on the nation, with the support of Minister of War Korechika Anami, in order to stop anyone attempting to make peace."
This AFTER Hiroshima.
Even when the decision to surrender finally was made after Nagasaki, there was a failed military coup to overturn the decision.
Your assertions of an ignored French surrender after Hiroshima don't seem particularly convincing. Of course, if you have evidence, I'll reconsider.
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 12:05 PM
I am sorry, but one thing I get real tired of is armchair quarterbacking
Then why are you reading this thread?
Posted by: prosfilaes
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August 6, 2010 12:08 PM
Counting civilians differently is a sexist and ageist policy in a war like WWII. Practically every healthy young adult male in the warring countries was part of the military, and those men were most of the military at the time. You're saying that by being drafted, or giving into massive social pressure and joining, these men's lives are worth less then those who couldn't be drafted.
Posted by: baldywilson
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August 6, 2010 12:09 PM
Please tell me you are joking. "They started it"? Seriously? Are you 2? "Jimmy, why have you killed Billy and cut up his corpse", "He started it mum! He punched me in the nose".
Christ on a pogo stick, even children understand the stupidity of this excuse. Japan bombed Pearl Harbour, ergo it was justified to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Sickening.
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 12:09 PM
A sock in the mouth is the best you'd deserve for that anyways ... It is nice to live in a world where we feel free to criticize the deeds of generations passing...
So you want to sock PZ in the mouth while patting yourself on the back for being so open to criticism that...what? You didn't suggest shooting him instead?
Posted by: gburnett
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August 6, 2010 12:11 PM
I cannot agree, P.Z.. I have studied the Pacific war in detail and the Japanese had shown no signs of surrendering, or even considering it. On the contrary - they let us know that if we did invade the home islands, they would immediately kill all Allied POWs (although they had killed over 1/3 of them during their incarceration) and were ready to fight to the death of the last Japanese man, woman, and child. In the island campaigns up to that point, they had done so, losing tens of thousands at Iwo Jima with only a handful surrendering. If it took the deaths of their countrymen via the atomic bomb to get them to change their minds from bloodlust to acceptance, then so be it. And you forget that conventional bombing raids killed even more Japanese than the atomic blasts - and there would have been a lot more of those before we invaded.
Posted by: mypantstheatre
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August 6, 2010 12:14 PM
If the purpose of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nothing more than terrorism, hatred or revenge, why didn't the US abandon all restraint and drop one on Tokyo, instead?
If my sole purpose was to demonstrate power through terrorism on a people that I hated and on whom I wanted vengeance, THAT would have been the way to go.
Posted by: 'Tis Himself, Quel Dommage
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August 6, 2010 12:14 PM
The War Department staff in Washington estimated there would be 250,000 to 500,000 American casualties in an invasion of Japan. After the war, some politicians casually made this a "half-million dead" and then "a million dead." In any event, the estimate of casualties included killed, wounded and missing. The original estimates were a not-unreasonable figure based on American experience with fanatical Japanese defenders of the Philippines, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and one which a postwar examination of Japanese plans for the defense of the Home Islands bore out. There was no indication the Japanese would fight any less strenuously if their Home Islands were invaded. Indeed, it was a safe bet that the fighting would have been even more costly. And this doesn't even consider the Japanese casualties.
The Japanese consistently demonstrated a marked reluctance to surrender, either on the battlefield or at the negotiating table. The American people, in light of Germany's surrender in May 1945, were eager to get the war in the Pacific over with as soon as possible. The voters were making this wish quite clear to their elected officials and the chief among these, President Truman, was listening intently. He had been told that a blockade of Japan might have to go on for a year or more before Japan finally gave in. A successful invasion would not be noticeably shorter. The American people would have none of this and wanted something done. Nuclear weapons were simply another incentive for the Japanese to surrender, and no one was sure they would be any more persuasive than the fire bomb raids (which killed more people than the atomic bombs).
Posted by: Doug
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August 6, 2010 12:16 PM
"a demonstration wouldn't have been effective". How do you know? "
Exactly. But we do know that the bomb worked, because the Japanese surrendered. We also know that dropping the bomb did not prolong the war, because the Japanese surrendered. We can never know what MIGHT have happened, all we know it what did. Remember, all of this came at the tail end of a conflict that lasted (depending on how you measure it) anywhere from six to eight years and cost (depending again on how you measure) somewhere between 60 and 80 million lives. As I said earlier, I think it's fair to criticize the decision, but don't forget that those who made those decisions did not have the information we have, nor the luxery of debating in a consequence free environment. The decisions they were forced to make had real consequences. Just remember that.
The argument about whether the Japanese were negotiating surrender is interesting. I had never heard that before and was curious enough to talk to a historian at my university about it. According to him, the Japanese probably were trying to surrender, but were still requesting terms, something the Allies had agreed not to agree to. He also noted that there was some evidence that Japan had actually made some surrender overtures after they lost the Battle of Midway, which I believe was in 1942 or 1943, but again they wanted terms.
Posted by: Copyleft
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August 6, 2010 12:19 PM
Hmm, so now it's claimed that focusing attacks on military targets rather than civilians would have been "sexist and ageist."It's interesting to see the creative defenses that are offered for terrorism!
Posted by: MrFire
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August 6, 2010 12:20 PM
Nor did I intend it to be. I intended it to mean just that: fuck you. The callous drivel that you wrote to inspire that reply, concerning no-holds-barred acceptance of collateral damage, deserved nothing less.
Again, just for you: fuck you.
Holy Tautology, Troll-Man. Not that you even bother to define 'pacifist' in any context other than the most meaningless, strawman-like terms (the flipside of your reasoning being that every successful wartime leader was a bloodthirsty death-monger).
Posted by: Dyolf Knip
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August 6, 2010 12:21 PM
> Japan bombed Pearl Harbour, ergo it was justified to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Actually, they bombed Pearl Harbor, attacked and occupied Allied bases in the Philippines, Indonesia, and elsewhere in SE Asia, and made some oddball attempts at using weapons of mass-destruction against North America. This, of course, was while they were conducting a nigh-on genocidal campaign against the Chinese, Koreans, and pretty much anyone else they came across.
Posted by: pdett
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August 6, 2010 12:21 PM
I'm on the side that says you go to war as a country. I'd also like to see nuclear weapons go away forever, but I don't think you're gonna unpickle that cucumber.
War is the lowest common denominator. As for justification, I really don't like that word here, but I find compelling arguments on both sides. However, if I'm sitting on the train on the way to work and the guy next to me slaps me in the face, unprovoked, should he expect a simple slap back or should he expect me to knock his fucking teeth down his throat?
just sayin'.
Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/SaqGVG0xvJEQVwURVamS3DTCdvov0BLhXK1jOsYPPJQ-#b4893
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August 6, 2010 12:22 PM
In war, a common admonition is, "Do not become what you behold." Unfortunately, in my opinion, we ignored that admonition, not just in Japan, but in Germany too.
Not "getting revenge" proved for us to be impossible to resist. If we were going to bomb anything, it should have been a sparsely populated area, not a densely populated one.
We were on the right side in that war, for sure. Hitler was surely one of history's most notorious characters. The Japanese were brutal beyond compare in China. But we had before us a defeated enemy. I'll never believe the majority of people we killed in Hiroshima were not innocent.
The bigger person always sticks to the admonition... And we didn't. Even though this happened many years before I was born, I still feel a sense of loss.
Same thing with our internment camps, which people continue to try to rationalize. And now, I'm reading that some politicians want to modify the 14th amendment, which closed down our internment camps. I find the idea of modifying our 14th amendment to be so egregious, I'd consider moving out of the country if they try.
People should rent or buy "Grave of the Fireflies", and watch it with your kids, at the earliest possible convenience.
MikeM
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 12:22 PM
I don't know that this is necessarily proof that the bombs worked.
The Japanese were already clearly defeated.
Raids of similar destructiveness didn't force their hand.
There's also the conveniently ignored fact that the Japanese surrender also corresponds rather nicely with the Russians entering the war against them - I think a toe to toe war with the Russians and the subsequent inevitable forced terms of surrender is probably a lot more scary than the prospect of having your cities nuked (given that the burning of multiple Japanese cities did squat - as one would expect considering the reaction to the Blitz and the firebombings of German cities)
So we killed hundreds of thousands because victory was not enough, we required absolute victory.
Posted by: Dyolf Knip
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August 6, 2010 12:23 PM
> If the purpose of the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were nothing more than terrorism, hatred or revenge, why didn't the US abandon all restraint and drop one on Tokyo, instead?
Because Tokyo had already been fairly leveled in conventional bombing runs that whole year. US military planners decided that making the rubble bounce would be neither a productive use of the weapon nor an effective demonstration of its power. Hence its use on two cities that had been relatively untouched by the war to date.
Posted by: lose_the_woo
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August 6, 2010 12:23 PM
The likelihood of the Japanese of WWII surrendering to a stand-off demonstration of force, by all credible accounts, is very slim. They viewed their emperor as a god. They were driven to kill or die. They were not interested in diplomacy. Furthermore, the USA was feeling a bit of war fatigue caused in Europe, to put it mildly.
I can't say emphatically whether I agree with the use of the bombs or not. I can only say that I tend to accept that their use was unfortunately the one necessary evil that probably put an end to the rest of the evils of that war, which brutalized nations and cost so many lives.
Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold
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August 6, 2010 12:24 PM
Ordeneus said:
It also ignores there was no real need to invade the Japanese home islands. The US and her allies could have pursued a policy of containment. The Japanese had no navy or airforce left capable of challenging the allies. The war in Europe was over, and assets used in the war were already being prepared to be sent to the Far-East.
Posted by: Brownian, Most Vicious & Petty of Pharyngulites
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August 6, 2010 12:26 PM
Wow. If somebody calls you an asshole, should he expect you to call him one back or should he expect to be shot in the fucking face?!
Do the world a favour and never become a cop, soldier, or any other individual with authority, mostlywater.
Posted by: Wise Bass
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August 6, 2010 12:27 PM
Indeed - I think the Japanese fighting in China is one of the most overlooked bits of World War 2 history for Americans. It soaked up a huge amount of lives - Japanese and Chinese - and involved such unpleasant bits as Unit 731.*
* For those of you too lazy to click the link, Unit 731 was a Japanese military station that did a crap-ton of biological and chemical weapons testing (and usage) during World War 2. The Japanese tested these weapons on thousands of live prisoners, ranging from POWs to Chinese civilians.
Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold
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August 6, 2010 12:29 PM
You surely mean not interested in diplomacy other than the diplomacy they engage in ? You do know the Japanese were in contact with the Soviets and actively looking for a way to end to the war ? How is that not diplomacy ?
If you are going to make an argument you cannot make up your own facts.
Posted by: Kieranfoy, Faerie Godfather of Death, GMKSC, OED
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August 6, 2010 12:31 PM
Blood for the Blood God!
Seriously, though, how can an ethical person write that sentance? You're talking about slaughtering civilians! People who are just going about their daily little lives.
Posted by: Dyolf Knip
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August 6, 2010 12:31 PM
> The US and her allies could have pursued a policy of containment
Would you say that in the long run that policy would have been better for the Japanese people? Particularly when we have Cuba or Iraq as examples of its use over long periods of time?
Posted by: spage
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August 6, 2010 12:32 PM
I read recently that Curtis LeMay said that if we had lost the war, he would have been prosecuted as a war criminal for his ordering of the fire-bombing of Tokyo and other Japanese cities. But we won, and he got some medals.
Just like how the people that waterboarded American POWs were tried and at least some were executed, while the Americans who waterboarded suspected terrorists are heralded as defenders of 'freedom.'
Funny how that works.
Posted by: Dyolf Knip
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August 6, 2010 12:33 PM
#165 Actually, just forget I said that.
Posted by: Wise Bass
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August 6, 2010 12:33 PM
Which would have meant millions dead from starvation in 1946, due to the rice crop failures in 1945 in Japan.
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 12:35 PM
Anyone that comes out of that complex without tears is not human.
Nah...the ones that come out grinning and mumbling, "Heh, heh, we blasted them" are Americans.
Posted by: vbalbert
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August 6, 2010 12:35 PM
Dyolf Knip:
Containment of Iraq was a lot cheaper in both lives and money than the war was. We don't have a policy of containment for Cuba. It's more of one of staying away. No diplomatic ties and laws preventing visitation or trade with the island.
Posted by: ATrampAbroad
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August 6, 2010 12:37 PM
If I might weigh in:
1. The decision to make a "demonstration drop" was considered and and rejected. In August only three bombs had been completed; if the war had had to be continued, it would have been(in our government's consideration) a waste of a bomb.
2. Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were home to major military complexes and had been chosen for those reasons. It is a little known fact that about a dozen American POWs were killed who had been held captive.
3. It is also important to consider the absolute irrationality of the Japanese military. As much as Samurai movies have made "honorable suicide" into a stupid cliche, it's easy to forget that they were really serious about fighting to the death.
When Japan's government met to consider surrendering, the vote was tied. Seriously. After two atomic bombings(and a lot of little bombings too) most of the Japanese general staff were still in favor of continuing the war.
Of course, not of this contradicts the fact that it was an awfully inhumane decision to make. I think it's a bit awkward to talk about apologizing, though, while Japanese schoolbooks still pretends that this
and this are fictional events.
Posted by: iiandyiiii#0fab0
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August 6, 2010 12:38 PM
I can't even imagine sitting where Truman did and turning over the various options. There was not a single fucking option that would have guaranteed a "good outcome". Even doing nothing, which probably would have been far worse.
Perhaps dropping the second bomb was wrong, and if so, it was terribly wrong. Perhaps the first should have been a demonstration. Perhaps we should have blockaded the islands and allowed the Japanese people to starve into complete surrender. But I don't know.
I do believe that PZ and others are kidding themselves if they think this decision would have been an easy one if they had been in charge.
Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold
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August 6, 2010 12:39 PM
Dyolf Knip:
Probably not, but it is hardly relevant since I was not arguing it would have been better for the Japanese. I was arguing there was no need for the Allies to invade the Japanese home islands and suffer the large loss of life that has been suggested.
UnWise Bass said:
And ? You clearly did not understand my argument. See above and try again.
Posted by: lose_the_woo
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August 6, 2010 12:39 PM
I think there is a conflation here.
A proportionate analogy would illustrate an escalation of rhetoric, not a transition from rhetoric to the use of physical force.
This conflation is common among extremist religious believers. A blunt example is that when insulting an extremist muslim by drawing a cartoon of mohummad, the extremist thinks they now have the right and obligation to inflict fatal physical injury to the cartoonist. Unsophisticated thinking rationalizes the transition from pure thought expression to physical aggression.
Realizing that common conflation brought along the beginnings of the enlightenment, which was based fundamentally on the idea that no person should fear another person, and that all ideas are worthy of exploration.
Posted by: Doug
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August 6, 2010 12:40 PM
"I don't know that this is necessarily proof that the bombs worked."
Fair enough.
"There's also the conveniently ignored fact that the Japanese surrender also corresponds rather nicely with the Russians entering the war against them"
Also fair and a good point. It's also possible that Russia declared war because the bomb was dropped and Japan seemed on the point of toppling, and the Russian desperately wanted the Sahkalin Islands. Maybe not. Things rarely happen for just one reason, though, so maybe it was a little of all of it?
"So we killed hundreds of thousands because victory was not enough, we required absolute victory."
Yes, but again think about the perspective of those making the decisions at the time. The enemies in question were countries whose military had killed millions in Europe and millions in China -- did they deserve terms? If it were me, I probably would have let them quit after Midway, just to avoid a prolonged split theater war, but again, I'm making this decision with 65 years of hindsight.
Posted by: Brownian, Most Vicious & Petty of Pharyngulites
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August 6, 2010 12:41 PM
Have you been to a bookstore in Texas lately? Tu quoque isn't an argument you want to be making.
Posted by: baldywilson
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August 6, 2010 12:42 PM
My comment was in specific reference to the, utterly jaw-dropping, defence of "they started it".
Posted by: Kobra
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August 6, 2010 12:42 PM
War is naught but mutual terrorism. That's why we should avoid war.
Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold
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August 6, 2010 12:43 PM
The main reason they were chosen is that they were relatively undamaged from the B29 raids. The military target argument is a poor one, since nearly all Japanese cities at the time were had significant military targets.
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 12:43 PM
Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were home to major military complexes and had been chosen for those reasons.
Then why hadn't they been bombed significantly before? They were chosen at least partly as being relatively intact cities. If they were of such great military imporance, the US and allies must have been pretty incompetent to have not bombed them as much as, say, Tokyo, before 1945. It's also pretty widely accepted that Nagasaki at least was not among the top candidates for the bombing and was chosen partly because of weather conditions. Again, if it were so important miliarily why was it such a last choice target?
Posted by: history punk
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August 6, 2010 12:44 PM
It is important to remember that the longer the war continued the more Americans died. It is also important to note that the more Chinese, Koreans, Vietnamese, and members of other occupied and allied nations.
Also as the CIA's history (http://bit.ly/QskjY) on the atomic bomb notes:
Now, I know the anti-American trolls and people like PZ Myers who have never consulted an relevant archive, filed a FOIA request, conducted an oral history, or read anything on the bombing than highly dated and somewhat rejected works such as Atomic Diplomacy or whatever dribble Chomsky or Zinn have committed to paper will attack the CIA source just because it is a CIA source.
Posted by: Penny
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August 6, 2010 12:44 PM
#129
#145
I go with #145
I think the discussion of what counts as terrorism is different if you are talking about a conflict such as WWII that if you are talking about the present day, with no global conflict (thankfully) in progress.
Posted by: Aratina Cage
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August 6, 2010 12:44 PM
Only in democracies. Japan was not a democracy.
If you slap him back you will likely go to jail, too. If you knock his teeth in, you will definitely be on your way to jail.
Posted by: Brownian, Most Vicious & Petty of Pharyngulites
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August 6, 2010 12:46 PM
Maybe.
Posted by: dckolb
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August 6, 2010 12:46 PM
@PZ
“The nuke apologists are being called trolls because they are not making rational arguments.”
On the contrary, they are, you just choose to ignore them.
“You've got to be kidding. Is anyone arguing that incinerating more civilians was the answer?”
By simple causality, you are. Despite what some might claim, based on post war intelligence the Japanese were preparing a significant defense in depth of the home islands, they were not considering surrender, they had kept far more airplanes in reserve than suspected by American war planers and using kamikaze tactics would have wreaked havoc on Allied troop ships. You also conveniently forget that the war was still being fought in Indonesia and China where 10’s of thousands were dieing every week (approximately a Hiroshima or Nagasaki every month), if the war had been allowed to devolve to stalemate waiting for a negotiated surrender this killing would have continued for months. And that “negotiated” surrender would have left the Japanese military still firmly in control of the home islands and possibly even some of the territory in China that they still occupied in August 1945. How is that preferable?
“Is anyone claiming that hundreds of thousands of deaths was ethical because we didn't use a nuke?”
By singling out the atomic weapons, you are. As has been pointed out conventional weapons were quite capable of killing equally horrible numbers – the only difference is the type of weapon used. People die horrible lingering deaths from burns suffered in a fire bomb attack or from wounds received in conventional bomb attacks, are these less horrible just because they were not caused by atomic bombs? I don’t think so.
“The demonstrable existence of a super weapon was persuasive to convince them that further resistance was futile. Killing: unnecessary.”
How does one demonstrate the super-weapon without using it? As has been noted it took the Japanese a full day just to confirm that one of their major cities had just been obliterated, dropping the bomb on a remote atoll would have been pointless and the US had exactly two atomic bombs (neither of which were guaranteed to work) with no promise of creating any additional bombs for many months.
“That's the problem -- no effort was made to minimize Japanese civilian casualties. We had dehumanized them so much that vaporizing them wasn't seen as criminal.”
Why should that be a consideration given the wholesale slaughter of civilians that had already gone on on all sides in the previous years – I’ve seen estimates as high as 60 million casualties with 80 to 90% of those being civilians another 200K is round-off error. Yes that’s callous but given the time minimizing civilian casualties was way down the list.
"we did it as a demonstration to the Russians".
If this was in fact part of the calculation, it was minimal – Ending the war quickly with minimal loss of Allied lives was the top priority.
Posted by: pdett
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August 6, 2010 12:46 PM
@Brownian #161
It was a question posed, perhaps poorly phrased, not a suggested course of action. My point simply being how much responsibly falls to the aggressor? Terms like 'justification' or 'appropriate response' start to lose meaning in the insanity of world war.
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 12:46 PM
I'd argue that yes, they deserved terms. Killing hundreds of thousands, or potentially millions - which would have been the outcome if the Japanese had not surrendered for whatever reason - categorically isn't worth doing for the few terms which apparently were on the table.
On the Russians - it appears (at least from what's been said above) that the Russian invasion was already in the works as part of an agreement with the US to join the war effort - given the planning that goes into an invasion I'm happy to work under the assumption that this was completely unrelated to the dropping of nukes.
Posted by: Wise Bass
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August 6, 2010 12:46 PM
Oh, so trying to negotiate after millions of Japanese starve to death from a blockade was better than accepting their surrender after hundreds of thousands died? Gotcha. Nice to see your priorities there.
Kyoto was actually the last-choice target, and Nagasaki the third after Kokura.
I agree that they were probably kept off the bombing lists for the use as potential targets (if it came to that, in the decision-makers' view).
Posted by: iiandyiiii#0fab0
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August 6, 2010 12:50 PM
Aratina, I believe that's a false legal analysis. If the confrontation ended after the second man slaps or punches his attacker, most courts would see that as self-defense, and therefore lawful. If the second man continued to assault his prone attacker, then that would be unlawful.
Posted by: lose_the_woo
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August 6, 2010 12:50 PM
Hmmm...
I agree. I'm not sure that's what I did. Clearly by you're level of excitement, to you, it seems I did.
Just because they engaged in diplomatic efforts, does not mean they were genuinely interested in them. This is what I meant. Not to mention that they were attacking US and US interests. I'm not aware of any substantive diplomatic efforts they were engaged in with the US at that time. I could be misinformed however. I was educated in the USA and perused some history books once or twice.
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 12:52 PM
did they deserve terms?
Do I have to quote Tolkien to you about the advisability of deciding who does and doesn't "deserve" a chance? The WWII era Japanese government was evil. Hard to dispute that one. Does that mean that every person in Japan was evil and deserved nothing but a slow death due to radiation poisoning? Would the world be better off if Japan had been completely destoyed as your "no terms" suggests that you favor?
Posted by: Kobra
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August 6, 2010 12:54 PM
@189: Some states have wacky laws about self-defense.
Posted by: hznfrst
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August 6, 2010 12:55 PM
I wasn't born when this happened, and of course my first reaction once I heard about it was one of sheer disgust and horror.
Since then I've many explanations of why it was considered necessary and can't say it was definitely the wrong thing to do considering the circumstances. One argument was that a demonstration which failed would have given Japan more reason to continue fighting against an inept enemy, at a cost of far more lives and resources.
In today's world, of course, we have crazed Islamists who would not hesitate to use nukes if they had them (does anyone seriously doubt this?) and have made a case for the West to hit them with all we've got before that happens (ducks and runs for cover from the moralists' assault).
Posted by: broboxley OT
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August 6, 2010 12:55 PM
@Ewan R #157
historically as a country the US has shown unwillingness to accept anything but unconditional absolute surrender but only after visiting horrendous punishments upon the citizenry we warred against. From the Indians, to Mexico to the Confederacy Philippines Cuba Germany and Japan into the present day conflicts. Perhaps it is a holdover from our English and Euro colonial ancestry tempered by a semi tropical climate in the earliest settlements.
Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold
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August 6, 2010 12:55 PM
Oh dear.
You really did not understand what I was saying did you ?
I will try explaining it for you.
People were arguing that dropping the bombs was justified since invading Japan could have cost a lot of allied lives.
The arguments for and against invading Japan amongst the Allies did not involve discussion about Japanese loss of life, but did involve discussion about Allied loss of life.
Do you see the difference or am I wasting my time with you ?
Posted by: DobyGS
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August 6, 2010 12:56 PM
Does anybody believe that if the US had not developed the atomic bomb that no one else would? From reading Rhodes "The Making of the Atomic Bomb", it was only a matter of time. If Germany or Japan had a bomb, do you think that would have used it? Neils Bohr wanted to develop a weapon so horrible that it would stop all wars, but the only success was that atomic weapons have not been deployed in war after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You have to feel that saner heads prevaled during the Cuban missile crisis based on knowledge of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The best way to avoid these awful decisions is to never start wars. We haven't learned our lesson. Thanks George W.
Posted by: pasadena beggar
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August 6, 2010 12:58 PM
The decision to use these bombs seems black and white, in hindsight. (But why did we bomb two cities? We couldn't prove our point using just the one?) I think we knew less, and were much more innocent 60 years ago. This is not to excuse the decision, but it isn't proper to fix a 21st Century outlook on an early 20th Century action.
Posted by: natural cynic
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August 6, 2010 12:58 PM
History is an n of 1.
In this wartime situation, there are no good answers and no good options.
Fuck war.
Posted by: Doug
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August 6, 2010 12:59 PM
True, American and Allies lives might have been saved. Probably also Japanese, Filipino, and various Pacific Islanders as well. What about China. though? If the Allies has accepted a Japanese armistice after Midway (or later) would that have stopped the slaughter in China and Korea? China was our ally at that time, the same as Britain or Russia. I don't know the details of the terms that Japanese wanted, but if this did not include a complete withdrawel of all military back to Japanese territory, then I don't think the Allies could have accepted.
Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold
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August 6, 2010 1:02 PM
Yes you did. You claimed the Japanese were not interested in diplomacy. That is not true. As I said they were in contact with the Soviets and looking for a way to end the war.
It is very clear that they were serious about the diplomatic efforts to end the war. It is true they had no direct contact with the US, but that is hardly surprising since they were at war and had no diplomatic contacts with the US. It is common for initial discussions about ending wars to take place with a third party. In this case it was the Soviet Union that was used to pass messages between Japan and the US.
So sorry, but you decided to make facts up when you claimed the Japanese were not interested in diplomacy. That is not honest.
Posted by: jay.sweet
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August 6, 2010 1:04 PM
I'm sorry to be so glib about such a serious subject, but I can't resist...
"If you'd prefer another target, a military target, THEN NAME THE SYSTEM!"
...
"You're far too trusting. We'll deal with your friend on Tatooine soon enough."
Posted by: Calaban
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August 6, 2010 1:05 PM
#111:
The account I read (dont have the reference sorry) concluded the that the second bomb had actually been rushed to completion precisely because Japan might surrender before it could be made ready - you see the 2nd bomb was of a different design than the first - they were afraid if they didn't hurry they might not get a chance to "test it".
Posted by: lose_the_woo
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August 6, 2010 1:05 PM
Clearly by my level of excitement I confused a possessive with a conjugation.
Posted by: broboxley OT
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August 6, 2010 1:05 PM
iiandyiiii #172 I would have made an easy decision.
Open up a beachhead and start transporting chinese in to take the island and occupy it until japanese would be an interesting ancient historical artifact of a small backward chinese province.
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 1:05 PM
Neils Bohr wanted to develop a weapon so horrible that it would stop all wars, but the only success was that atomic weapons have not been deployed in war after Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Technically, war has pretty much ended, at least for the US. The US has not gone to "war" since WWII. It has been involved in police actions, been a "peacekeeper" and invaded without any declaration of hostilities. But it hasn't declared war since using its entire nuclear arsenal on a country that was basically already defeated. Turns out ending war helps less than you might think.
Also, while the US hasn't dropped the atomic bomb since 1945, it has used the bomb to bully and intimidate others and basically act as a world dictator. Not a stellar performance any way you look at it.
Posted by: pdett
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August 6, 2010 1:05 PM
dang. #186
responsibility*
Posted by: Rachael
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August 6, 2010 1:08 PM
Trying to reduce the motivation behind the Japanese military leaders to a sort of "samurai" archetype is a bit simplistic. I think it's very worth considering that one of the primary justifications the Japanese government gave itself for its aggression was that it felt under constant threat by Western Imperialism. If you do any study of modern Japanese history, one of the greatest ironies is that Japan felt so threatened by the Imperialism of England and America that it effectively became the mirror of that Imperialism in an attempt to prove that it could "hang with the big kids," so to speak. One of the internal justifications for Japan's series of invasions that began in the 1930s was to create a buffer zone around Japan, as well as set up an Empire of countries that would feed Japan as the most advanced society. The war was framed to the Japanese citizenry as a way for "big brother" Japan to drive Western Imperialism from its nearby "little brother" countries and thus return harmony to Asia.
Toward the end of the war, there were actually a significant number of people within the government - including Prince Fumimaro, who was Prime Minister when the military dragged Japan into full-blown war with China - who thought total surrender would be better than fighting unto ultimate doom, which would completely destroy the Imperial throne. Even after the Soviet Union decided not renew their non-aggression pact and waded in to the fray, there was a lot of diplomatic maneuvering because that portion of the Japanese government hoped the Soviets would help them mediate a surrender that would keep the Emperor in power.
The decision to surrender was something of a deadlock. But that wasn't necessarily because a bunch of the ministers were so hot to trot to continue fighting - it was because the US demanded an unconditional surrender, and the Japanese military leaders wanted a surrender with no occupation or war crimes trials. Now, it takes some real balls to still think you're in a position to negotiate when you've had two atomic bombs dropped on you, but that's also not the same as wanting to continue the war.
Japan's got its own baggage to deal with. The government's refusal to apologize to the "comfort" women, their refusal to acknowledge the worst of their war crimes is a black mark against them. However, that in no way justifies our own refusal to apologize. If we think it's shitty that they're not apologizing for doing some awful stuff, then it's pretty shitty for us to not apologize for killing a LOT of Japanese civilians, between the two bombs AND the firebombing of Tokyo.
I got in an argument with someone once in the review section at Amazon, over the book "Black Rain." They went off about how the book was anti-American. (I've seen similar reactions to "Barefoot Gen.") I pointed out that it's not anti-American to point out that it really blows to have an atomic bomb dropped on your city - it's fact. And the facts of history aren't there to make us feel good about ourselves or tie into a neat justification of how everything the US of A does is awesome. It's definitely a fair argument to make that we were on the side of the "good guys" in WWII. But that doesn't also mean that everything we did was laudable and that we owe no apologies for our actions.
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 1:09 PM
@201: Actually, I think your quote is pretty on topic. The "logic" was much the same in both cases...
Posted by: Brownian, Most Vicious & Petty of Pharyngulites
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August 6, 2010 1:10 PM
For your reaction? What you do in response to an attack really depends on what kind of person you consider yourself to be.
Bullshit. That's why we've got terms like 'war crime'. All is not fair in love and war. Or why did we bother trying Nazis at Nuremburg? Is this a "but he started it" kinda situation? If that's your case, then I reiterate my claim about you not entering a profession such as police officer or soldier. They're not allowed to lose their shit just because someone else is the aggressor.
"Fuck, it's a war we didn't start! Let's let chaos reign supreme!" [Stabs a menacing-looking kitten.]
Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold
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August 6, 2010 1:10 PM
The bomb dropped on Nagasaki was a plutonium implosion device, whereas the one dropped on Hiroshima was a uranium gun device.
The scientists and engineers were sure the Hiroshima device would work and so no test was done of the design prior to its use on Hiroshima. The plutonium device was far more technically complex, and was tested on July 16th 1945 at Whitesands.
Posted by: jcwelch
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August 6, 2010 1:10 PM
Again PZ, how would you have shown them? Television? no, didn't exist in a usable format. Radio? no, because that was trivial to fake even then. (See "war of the worlds"). Send them a nice invitation?
"Dear enemy. Please have your military and civilian leaders in one place that we know about on a specific date to watch us drop a bomb. We promise, we won't drop it on them.
sincerely,
that country that is trying to kill you"
They wouldn't have worded it that way, but that's the only sane way to read it.
Film?
How do you get it to them? How do you convince them it's real?
What's it going to show anyway? An atoll that's now a lot more beat up than it was? Big deal.
"We should have demo'd it" sure, nice idea, but with the technology of the time, the chances it would have been seen as anything but a bluff, if it was even taken seriously, would have been slim. Don't forget, you're talking about a group of leaders who had serious beliefs that they were not only divinely protected, but were materially better than everyone else.
The group in charge of Japan was not the most rational bunch.
like you said, they didn't really know what would happen. not like there was a lot of valid test data to work with.
No more than your alternate reality of "it would have been okay".
Given that Japan still attempts to cover up the atrocities it committed in the war it started against China et al, forgive me if I don't feel the need to be forgiven. Japan had the choice to not start that war. They had the choice to not commit the atrocities they committed.
they chose to believe in bullshit shinto myths about their own divine origin instead. Even when one of their best military minds warned that they would absolutely lose to the US, they made their decision.
I truly wish they had not, and that the millions of chinese, southeast asian, japanese, american, european and other people, (soldiers, civilians, in the end, dead is dead) had not died. I wish the Japanese had, even in conflict, held on to some basic definition of honor, and not been pulling the same stunts we hung Nazis for, like germ warfare experiments and genocide.
But they made that choice. All the results that come out of it, including Hiroshima and Nagasaki, (which were military targets, regardless of belief, they just weren't separate from civilians, another deliberate choice of the Japanese command) is the result of that choice. Hopefully, no one else will ever make that particular choice again.
But to beg forgiveness for hiroshima and nagasaki?
Not until Japan has begged forgiveness for their acts. To date, they've yet to show the same contrition as Germany.
Until that happens, the US has no guilt for Aug. 6th or Aug 9th.
Also, for those complaining about how we shouldn't have chosen the 'lesser' of two evils, that's what war is. Evil. Every decision is based on an evil selfishness: "what can i do today that will hurt THEM more than US". It is the core of every tactic and every strategy. "Make them suffer more than us". That's why the military really doesn't like war. They're the ones doing most of the dying.
civilian? maybe not. Military? Patton. LeMay. yeah, the better ones are. They make decisions that kill people en masse in rather sickening ways. You have to be somewhat bloodthirsty to do that.
One of the reasons to not sanitize what war does to people, (and a bomb explosion does not care what your civil status is), to make people see the uncut, unedited results is to make them never again casually approve a war.
Had we not been so protected from what bullets and fire really do to humans, i doubt we'd have been so eager to go into Iraq, or any other number of places.
Posted by: Utakata
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August 6, 2010 1:12 PM
The way some peeps are going on, this thread should be renamed "The Way to Justify War Crimes and Get Away With It." Which means if Hitler would of been the victor, this thread would most likely be filled with those who thought culling certain ethnic groups was a good thing. And give a "rational" multi-paragraph dissertation as to why.
Crimes against humanity is crimes against humanity. There is no justification for it...whether we're the victor or not. And whether "the enemy" is taking over the world or not. Because those acts we've committed makes us no better than "the enemy." In many cases it makes us even worse.
Today this is where Americans and their allied forces should hold their head in shame for what they have done...instead of making large write ups about why this was a good thing with flags waving.
And kudos to whoever mentioned "Graveyard of the Fireflies".
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 1:13 PM
I have no idea what the Midway terms may or may not have been, from reading the above it appears that the terms required were:-
No occupation of Japan, Emperor stays, Japanese deal with war criminals, Japanese deal with disarmament.
The first two I have no major issue with, the third is distasteful, but sometimes conflict resolution requires distasteful acts - I'm still partially appalled that Gerry Adams and others of the same murderous cohort are considered politicians now - the final point may have been the big stumbling point, although my guess is some sort of get around would have been achievable. One might have thought that decent terms of surrender might have been one thing that seemed a good idea given that the terms of surrender in WWI were at least in part to blame for the eruption of WWII.
broboxley @#194 - I was under the impression (perhaps wrongly) that conditional surrenders were way more common in European conflicts - not least because generally both sides were equally matched enough that forcing an unconditional surrender was generally bad for everyone - could be wrong here, my limited knowledge of history is fuzzily focused around WWII.
Also historical unwillingness to do anything but be a giant prick doesn't make repeating the same thing over again with more lives at stake any less prickish.
Posted by: Jud
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August 6, 2010 1:13 PM
Having read a lot of posts by folks claiming to know a lot, I'm left with the desire to know more about the following:
1. What (if any) reliable primary sources exist regarding who controlled Japanese decisionmaking at the relevant time, and what their position was (positions were) regarding surrender?
2. Is there any indication a demonstration on an uninhabited target was ever considered, and if so, why it was rejected? If not, what (if any) realistic scenario for such a demonstration is there, taking into account the desire to avoid exposing much information about these weapons to the enemy, their very limited number, and the necessity for a trusted eyewitness account of such a demonstration (trusted by the Americans to act "rationally" in the face of the demonstration, trusted by the Japanese to report accurately) given the absence of adequate, trusted communications media?
- Even if the Japanese would not have surrendered absent these bombings, and even if an effective demonstration on uninhabited ground would not have been possible, I wonder how many of us would be in favor of a similar conclusion to a war today with a non-nuclear opponent? The full sadness and horror of what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki is measured by the fact that any nation that used nukes today against a non-nuclear opponent would deservedly become an international pariah.
Posted by: windy
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August 6, 2010 1:14 PM
Like at Katyn, for example?
Posted by: Tuxedo Cartman
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August 6, 2010 1:17 PM
I used to be on the fence about whether or not using atomic bombs to quickly end the war, and thus saving American soldiers' lives, was the right thing to do. It seemed like a bad decision either way, and not one I envied Truman having to make.
Then I caught a History Channel program on Hiroshima that filled in a bit of knowledge I did not have before. It seems that the time and place for the first bomb to be dropped was determined because it was in the middle of morning rush hour, as people were on their way to work. The military wanted to see just how many people one of these bombs could destroy in one go. They didn't aim for the strategic military targets in Hiroshima, they dropped the bomb on the city's center. At rush hour.
Inexcusable.
The Japanese atrocities in China are no excuse for that sort of military action on our behalf. How would you feel if the French dropped a nuclear bomb on Kansas City in response to what our military did in Fallujah? I'm sorry, but I don't care what vile things our enemies resort to in war; I hold my military to a higher standard.
Posted by: Brownian, Most Vicious & Petty of Pharyngulites
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August 6, 2010 1:19 PM
Gee, how did they find out about Nagasaki and Hiroshima, jcwelch? Nice invitations by the survivors?
"Dear non-residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Please stop by to see our burned and dripping flesh, and leveled cities. BYOB."
Posted by: spacefall
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August 6, 2010 1:19 PM
That is an excellent point. If the Japanese had been on our side and, say, the Germans had nuked them, we would have stood by them if they chose not to surrender in the face of adversity. Many of us would probably have called them commendable, valiant even! We might even put Japanese slogans of not giving in on tacky tourist postcards.
There seems to be mixed information about why the bombs were dropped and whether the Japanese would have surrendered anyway. And of course we can't tell whether other strategies would have led to more or less suffering on either side, regardless of the estimates thrown out by the military of the time. Life isn't that predictable. But that doesn't make the vaporization of so many innocent* people for the purposes of scaring their military into submission anything less than a despicable act of terrorism. Whether it worked or not is hardly the issue. If the Blitz had caused England to surrender would we call it justifiable?
One doesn't have to support the firebombing of Japan to condemn what happened at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
*As someone said, in a non-democratic country the citizens do not elect to go to war. Even in a democracy plenty protest -- or have we forgotten all of the Germans that sheltered Jews, the White Rose, or (closer to home for most) the hippies of the sixties and the draft dodgers?
Posted by: viggen
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August 6, 2010 1:21 PM
I agree with many of the things you say otherwise, but I do not fundamentally agree with this line of posting, PZ. I think you've cherry-picked an historical atrocity to support a stance against modern american militarism. Problem is that you've picked it out of a section of history where the world political climate looks like something that just popped out of somebody's stomach wall in the middle of a Ridley Scott film. WWII was one big long string of atrocities that positively stagger the imagination. 56 million people died in WWII... that's like the entire population of Iraq (in the year 2000 mind you) dying twice. What happened then is not comparable to anything that has happened since and by implying the comparison, you are belittling what happened then on all sides.
I think it is above argument that an entity like WWII is inexcusable and I think it's in exceptionally poor taste to single out the place of the U.S. in that quagmire as if we had perpetrated some special, particularly heinous atrocity--if you look closely at that war, all sides were continuously engaged in finding new and particularly efficient ways of killing each other, the U.S. just happened to invent that way first. That was the last time world stage powers fought an open war with the explicit aim of winning at all costs and nobody involved came out of it blameless. We should be thankful that it was the last war of its kind and we should bear clearly in mind that nothing like it has happened since. One clear outcome of that war is that no nuclear weapon has been used in combat since.
If you want to appear either fair or balanced in this post, you'd better be putting up similar posts on red-letter days for atrocities committed by other countries during that war. In the scope of that particular war, one hundred thousand lives snuffed out was practically nothing-- 199,000 total, approximately 0.3% of the casualties of the whole war. I'm not arguing it was good, I'm arguing that you're taking it way out of its just context.
Posted by: Gaebolga
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August 6, 2010 1:22 PM
From a historical perspective, every single new weapon that humanity has ever developed, especially the ones that are supposed to "make war so terrible it will end war itself," we've used.
Promptly.
Claims of immorality regarding our nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki may be valid, but they're also fundamentally meaningless. I challenge anyone to look at history and find some organized group of people that hasn't commited atrocities. Only the size, scope, and targets change, based on circumstance and available technology.
If you choose to look at us through the filter of morality, then humanity, in total as well as any subset you might wish to designate, is quite immoral. Predictably so. We are forced to kill for our very survival. What we kill may vary considerably based on local ecosystems, but if people are going to live, something's gotta die.
So, is all this talk of immorality a means of ensuring that the collective we don't make the same mistakes again, on both sides? Because if not, then this whole discussion is as empty as any religion you'd care to name.
Posted by: Tim
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August 6, 2010 1:26 PM
IMHO, this is just too complex an issue to explore in three paragraphs. But on balance I agree we should have made some effort to end the war with less bloodshed.
A demonstration would have used half our fissile material with no guarantee of success. In fact, given what we knew about the Japanese high command, it seems likely they would have shrugged it off.
I think we should have tried something along diplomatic lines. Let's say we announced a five day cessation of bombing Japan, and extended feelers to drop the "unconditional surrender" demand. Maybe just dropping the use of those two words would have been enough, who knows? Was there a phrase that would have enabled the Japanese to save face, while at the same time ensuring that they could not rebuild their military?
At the same time we could give them a demonstration by showing them some of the Alamagordo footage, and offering to fly an observation team to the test site to see firsthand what the bomb could do.
We could also take a page from the European theater. There was much sentiment towards the end in favor of accepting unconditional surrender, but only to the Western allies, not to Russia. If the Japanese realized that continuing the struggle would result in Russia entering the war and eventually swallowing half of Japan, that might have swayed them.
Japan knew it was beaten, and knew it was just a matter of deciding what the post war world would look like. Had we given them some voice in that decision, however small, who knows what might have happened?
Stateside morale would never have accepted relaxing the unconditional surrender demand if done publicly. But if we could pull it off privately, the mantra "saving half a million American lives" would be pretty convincing.
We'll never know how history would have unfolded had we not used the bomb. Perhaps the USSR would have concluded that we were too weak and indecisive to use nuclear weapons. Europe might have looked like it was there for the taking. A dacha in Lisbon, comerade?
Posted by: Doug
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August 6, 2010 1:28 PM
The History Channel also shows programs claiming that ancient astronauts created the human race. I would question them as a source.
If we were at war with France at the time, then I would think we should have eliminated them as a threat. Remember, both China and the US were at war with Japan, and were Allies.
Posted by: broboxley OT
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August 6, 2010 1:30 PM
Ewan R #213 European wars were often conditionally ended but you have to remember how america became a country. That it was a schizophrenic brother vs brother conflict as well as a war of extermination of the native inhabitants. An excellent book
http://books.simonandschuster.com/Hornet%27s-Nest/Jimmy-Carter/9780743255448 describing in a readable fictional form of how we started as a country. Not long afterwards was the war between the states followed by the last of the Indian wars. If we are willing to act like that to our Friends Neighbors and relatives woo help the stranger who wants to tangle with us. Its inbred by now. Perhaps an evolutionary dead end but I sadly dont think so.
Posted by: gadow
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August 6, 2010 1:31 PM
I haven't been a religious person in a long while, but I still find amazement that the very first use of a nuclear weapon of mass destruction would have occured on the Feast of the Transfiguration.
According to the story from the Gospels (well, three of them anyway) Jesus went up to a mountain with three disciples to pray. There, he was temporarily transformed into a being of pure light. The purpose of this tale is to show Heaven coming to earth in a promise of hope and eternal life. But when Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, what happened was that Hell came to earth with a promise of death and eternal fear.
I have a nagging suspicion that the date of the first attack was deliberately chosen with the plan of showing the "heathens" the true power of "Christian America."
Posted by: Brianblackberry
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August 6, 2010 1:31 PM
Aside the problem of finding a location remote enough and mutually having the Japanese senior military fully realize its real devastating potential isn't really plausible. The idea that if the Japanese leadership would have given up after witnessing such a spectacle is pure guesswork. We have no evidence they would have given in and considering at the time we had only a couple of bombs, wasting one in such a way and having the military leadership (who actually ran the nation) brush it off would have been a disaster.
We know from history many elements in the military at the top levels were still prepared to fight even after the second bomb and even considered a coup against Hirohito, who at that point wanted to surrender. Fortunately enough in the military realized at that point (and not knowing how many atomic bombs America possessed), enough was enough and weer able to prevent such a coup.
If the bombs were not used, it may have been another 2 years of bloody war over the islands of Japan itself, which may have costs the lives hundreds of thousands of Americans and millions of Japanese.
Besides all of that, considering the total war nature of the Second World War and all that had happened, using them was most likely seen as no worse at the time. Sadly people still were painfully ignorant to the long term effects of such a weapon, to them it was just the biggest of bombs in an era of indiscriminate and massive bombing.
Posted by: D--rock
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August 6, 2010 1:35 PM
There are many important facts to keep in mind regarding these bombings.
I'm sure you have all heard the figure of 1 million American casualties, yes? Well, at that point in the war we had an average kill ratio of 1 American dead for every 4 Japanese dead. Okinawa changed that to roughly 2 Japanese casualties for every 1 American.
So, the Japanese would have anywhere from 2 million to 4 million dead if we were to invade Japan. Probably more considering the immense number of banzai charges that would have been carried out and the kamikaze bombers.
As to why not hit a military center and avoid a civilian one?
Well, we had fire bombed the top 50 most populated japanese cities. All of them. Burnt to the ground. We started from the top and worked our way down.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, probably, the most populated cities in Japan at that time.
So, a military base might not have phased the Japanese commanders.
Finally, why not hit an atoll or some other uninhabited place?
Because we had only a handful of these weapons on hand. I am pretty sure we only had the two. I do remember reading that by 1950 we barely had over 10 of these weapons.
So, we bomb an atoll... and the japanese are unimpressed. What if we then hit a city, and they are unimpressed? Sadly, the best bet may have been to hit them with everything we got and hope that convinces them to give up.
The options tended towards dropping the a-bombs and hopping for a quick end to the war, or blockading and starving them out over the course of a year or more, invading and inflicting millions of casualties on them.
So, which do you prefer? Millions of deaths of a long period of time, or the murder of 200,000 over a much shorter period of time?
These are the types of shitty decisions that must be made in war.
Posted by: PZ Myers
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August 6, 2010 1:35 PM
How would I have gotten the information to the Japanese? I would have invited a Japanese diplomat from a neutral country to board a battleship; barring that, give a few dozen Japanese POWs cameras and put them on the deck. Also, of course, the Russian ambassador to the US would be invited to bring some staff.
Then blow up some island as close to Japan as was possible.
Let the POWs, diplomats, etc. go home and spread the word.
Wait a few days.
None of this is impossible, it isn't even hard. It would be a very impressive demonstration.
Now I agree with many that it's entirely possible the Japanese leadership would not have found it compelling, they might have wanted to continue the war. That's what the second bomb would be for, to provide inescapable evidence on their home ground of a new devastating weapon.
Then and only then do you use that terrible weapon to kill people, after you've given the leaders a chance to consider the likely outcome. That we failed to do so, but instead leapt at the chance to kill civilians with the first bomb as a demonstration, was a moral failure on our part.
Posted by: prosfilaes
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August 6, 2010 1:38 PM
Wouldn't have made it less stupid. The main reason they would be considered so commendable because they would be hampering the Germans from killing us.
And neither do the soldiers, most of whom didn't choose to be soldiers.
Posted by: pdett
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August 6, 2010 1:39 PM
@ #209
I consider myself the kind of person who doesn't attack others unprovoked. You can insist that I'm some ogre who beats people senseless for looking at me sideways, but you'd be quite wrong. Are you suggesting that the aggressor holds no responsibility for retaliation?
Seems to me the winners make the tribunals. But if want to place the label of justice on the business of killing people, where atrocities are committed by all sides, so be it.
For the record, I have no interest in law enforcement or the military nor have I stabbed any kittens, not even the menacing ones.
Posted by: Joffan
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August 6, 2010 1:40 PM
Wishful thinking. Japanese POWs would be regarded as worse than dead, as would any diplomat who cooperated with the enemy.
Posted by: shelley.just
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August 6, 2010 1:43 PM
Nuke apologists? Do you seriously think there is ANYONE in this thread who doesn't share your sense of outrage at this type of weaponry?
There are several people here who tried to point out that the nuclear bombs were not the only heinous act of war committed, yes, even against the Japanese people. However, you've only pointed out the nuclear bombs, as if these bombings were so much more inhumane then the other bombings.
So, atom bombs are out, but firebombs are OK, because it's so much easier to develop a sense of outrage against one type of act, as compared to the others.
And then when people engage in dialog that isn't simplistic or two dimensional, and definitely doesn't fit into a time slot on a Friday (right next to the last dead rhino, and followed by yet another Christian poll to bury), we're told that we're trolls, and nuclear apologists -- because anything else just takes too much work, and too much time. Above all the great PZ has a successful weblog he needs to feed, a brand to maintain. One that requires him to push outrage buttons at least five times a day -- maybe ten on a good day.
And outrage cannot afford nuance, thoughtfulness, or reason.
Way to go PZ. Way to go.
Posted by: blockhead
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August 6, 2010 1:45 PM
Anyone with any knowledge of the Japanese military's brutality and barbarity before and after Pearl Harbor, to their own soldiers as well as to everyone else, the ferocity of the Pacific war culminatining in Okinowa, their attitude and poor use of surrendering prisoners, repeated failed attempts to draw any conciliatory signs from them, and their military's clutch on the civilian government understands why the decision was made to use the atomic bomb. PZ's remarks on this are remarkably uninformed.
Posted by: PZ Myers
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August 6, 2010 1:47 PM
OK. You think wishfully that the Japanese were too military to accede to a demonstration, and authorize killing a hundred thousand people; I think wishfully that a despairing people already looking for a way out of a lost war would accept the demonstration as reasonable cause to surrender, and don't kill a hundred thousand people.
At least my way, if it doesn't work, you've still got a bomb, you can continue with Operation Bloodthirsty Vindictive Revenge. Your way...well, there's no takesies backsies after you've vaporized all those civilians.
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 1:49 PM
Frankly I think both sides of the arguement would agree wholeheartidly with this statement.
For completely different reasons.
Posted by: Anubis Bloodsin the third
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August 6, 2010 1:49 PM
I am not sure but I remember reading a few years back that the Kilo-tonnage was 15 kt (Little Boy) on Hiroshima and 21 kt (Fat Boy) on Nagasaki.
'Little Boy' converted approx 600 milligrams of mass into the destruction seen and the 'ethical' discussions ongoing ever since.
For what it is worth I also seem to recall the point that if after the second bomb the war was still ongoing then the project would be shelved for the duration because it was the shock horror that was the main weapon not the actual bomb.
If that had failed the US had no more refined Uranium to process into another bomb for at least 18 months.
It was a last gasp gamble in many ways but it was for a demonstration to the world not the subjugation of Japan per se.
It was basically an excuse to boast and promote the technology available for post war diplomatic pressures against what was perceived in Washington as the 'real' enemy.
No one knew until well after the cessation of hostilities that the US had basically shot its explosive capability bolt after Nagasaki.
This does not excuse the administration of the time, maybe adds a little justification in the mind set at that time, but it was unknown territory in many ways, not least the actual power of the beast they unleashed.
It is history now, the best that can be gleaned from the4 affair is the utter lunacy and sheer insanity inherent in the use of nuclear devices.
Did it shorten the war? maybe, methinks ironically more Japanese lives were actually saved through the policy but that is one hell of a stretch to actually condone the use.
Not that the saving of life was not worthwhile but I think the point is that was NOT the reason for the deployment, certainly not a moral consideration uppermost in US military minds at that time.
And was the inevitable subsequent global Cold war less acceptable then a hot one?
Maybe after WWII no one was left in a logistical economic or willed state fit enough to actually wage one, who knows.
Shaking a metaphorical 'le grande' blunderbuss at protagonists was probably the best anyone could hope for...and so it was so!
It is undoubtedly it is a complicated and interwoven tale with a myriad what iffs and maybees...in the end did anyone anywhere actually learn a lesson?
Yes they did...
Atomic, and the bastard offspring Nuclear, weapons are a fearsome and crippling force. Presumably a point not lost on any regime today that believes that infidels must die cos their god wills it so.
Posted by: broboxley OT
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August 6, 2010 1:54 PM
@PZ
that is your excuse?
When Carter was president he killed work on the neutron bomb because it was considered immoral. The neutron bomb had an ability to potentially kill a large swath of people with a very small footprint. Also called the capitalist bomb
China has developed a Neutron bomb. Russia may have.
My certainty is that without those two cities tragedy that it is has prevented greater tragedies from happening in the period between then and now and perhaps on American soil. Will there be another war where nukes are involved? Assuredly because people are retarded with no sense of history. At least for the last 60 years that hasnt happened.
Posted by: ian.monroe
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August 6, 2010 1:54 PM
@PZ you're missing the point that there was only two nuclear bombs. If they had a dozen, demonstrating off the coast of Japan or on their naval fleet would've made sense. But they only had two, and they wanted the Japanese to think they had a bunch.
It is an act of terrorism as you say. If you read the stories, suddenly there was a city that no one can contact and no one knew why. Thats horrifying. You can't terrorize the open sea.
In the context of World War 2, it wasn't even that brutal. Why we talk mark the bombing of Hiroshima (and not, say, the Tokyo fire bombing) is that it was a nuclear weapon. And that by using the nuclear weapon we set the political agenda of the 20th and 21st century (at least). Now everyone has to have a nuke. The reverberations continue today.
So... in my opinion, as an act of WW2 it was as justified as any other part of the war. But its longterm role in world history is still undetermined.
Posted by: Marco
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August 6, 2010 1:54 PM
In post #17, jrsutter wrote:
What kind of racist garbage is that?
The "Japs" were not humans?
Posted by: feralboy12
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August 6, 2010 2:02 PM
I don't have time to read over 200 comments before leaving mine, so excuse me if I repeat some points.
It was not a choice between the bomb and a bloody invasion. That's a false dichotomy. Japan had no navy left and could no longer bring war to anybody else. They had no defense against death from the sky. They were vulnerable to a blockade (although that would have its own cruelties).
They did not surrender after the first bomb at least partly because of lack of information regarding Hiroshima--the "fog of war" was extreme here.
The U.S. demanded unconditional surrender, and the Japanese expected the worst. They were never offered the conditions that they were granted in the end.
As for the argument that "it saved lives"--what sort of atrocity could you NOT justify with that excuse?
I don't like to demonize the people who made the decision--they were dealing with a situation that had no precedent in history. Still, it's a dark stain that tainted what was mostly a necessary and noble fight.
Posted by: dckolb
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August 6, 2010 2:04 PM
“Then blow up some island as close to Japan as was possible.
Let the POWs, diplomats, etc. go home and spread the word.
Wait a few days.
None of this is impossible, it isn't even hard. It would be a very impressive demonstration.”
Wishful thinking, PZ. The Japanese high command (military since they were the ones calling all the shots) were not impressed when this “demonstration” was done to Hiroshima, why would you think they would be impressed by a demonstration more remote and relying only on second hand information that they could easily dismiss as manufactured.
“Now I agree with many that
it's entirely possiblethe Japanese leadership would not have found it compelling, theymightwould have wanted to continue the war.”Fixed it for you – since we have empirical evidence that this is exactly what happened. Given that, why anyone would continue to put forward the claim that we should have conducted a “remote” demonstration is beyond me. As others have noted, a “demonstration” was considered but rejected for good reason and empirical evidence shows that this was the correct decision.
“That's what the second bomb would be for, to provide inescapable evidence on their home ground of a new devastating weapon.”
And even after the second “demonstration” the Japanese military was still in favor of continuing the war regardless of the cost and as noted above attempted a coup to prevent Hirohito from delivering the surrender message.
“Then and only then do you use that terrible weapon to kill people, after you've given the
leaders a chance to consider the likely outcome.”
Sorry PZ, but the previous 3-1/2 years of war with America had already given them ample opportunity to do that.
“That we failed to do so, but instead leapt at the chance to kill civilians with the first bomb as a demonstration, was a moral failure on our part.”
As has been pointed out numerous times, the point of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki attacks was not to “kill civilians”, both were legitimate military strategic targets.
Posted by: Doug
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August 6, 2010 2:04 PM
I think the US actually accepted #2.
Agreed. But the post-war treatment of Japan (and Germany) were nowhere near as harsh as the punative post-WWI German experience, and the post-war success of the 'losers' of WWII attests to a more enlightened type of peace. I am not always a fan of my country's behavior, but I do think that the treatment of our defeated enemies after the war is something we did more or less right.
Posted by: blockhead
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August 6, 2010 2:09 PM
The idea of a demonstration was considered, but
The. Japanese. diplomats. were. not. talking. to us. at. all.
So, its unlikely they would have been willing to travel from Sweden or wherever to a an atoll to watch our demonstration. And, at that time the bomb was tested only once. We did not know for sure if it would work a second time. I think the idea of a "demonstration" is naive, given the context and ferocity of the war.
"Operation Bloodthirsty Vindictive Revenge" thats a highly emotional response, imputing motives that I don't have. Japan was not going to surrender. The bombs saved American lives that would have been lost in an invasion of Japan, thats all I'm saying.
Annubis, The decision to use the bomb was multi-caused. Other factors, like the demonstration to Russia etc, played a role. But to ascribe centrality to peripheral reasons overlook the context of the war. It fits our emotional 21st C bias, and all the shit we have seen from the MI complex since WWII, but doesn't weight the other factors imo.
There are tons of books on this, pro and con.
Posted by: Lee
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August 6, 2010 2:11 PM
WWII was the murder of 10's of thousands of people per day. It didn't matter to them if they were killed by a machine gun bullet, or one of our 2 nuclear bombs. And it doesn't matter to me either. As far as I'm concerned these arguments about the morality of my countries decision to drop 2 nuclear bombs at the end of the war miss the point. The real lesson of the war is that we cannot afford another.
Posted by: Ken
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August 6, 2010 2:13 PM
What a pointless debate -- those responsible for the use of nukes are long dead. But people choose to debate this out of ignorance.
Meanwhile, some 15 million people, mostly innocent children, slowly starve to death each year. How many of you do-gooders here donate (anything) to help the starving? There's numerous charitable organizations out there that make a difference & I'd bet that most (perhaps even statistically ALL) of the people asserting a "high & mighty" sense of self-rightousness here haven't contributed an iota to those in need.
But judge others...no problems there...
Posted by: eandh99
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August 6, 2010 2:14 PM
PZ in #233 - but how much evidence was there at the time that they WERE looking for a way out? Because from what I've read, and seen cited in this thread, however much the civilian population might or might not have believed that the war was lost, the Japanese military which was in charge had certainly not accepted defeat and continued to resist this surrender right to the end.And why, as so many others have pointed out, all this focus on Hiroshima and Nagasaki when more people died in the bombing of Tokyo? Should we have continued to conventional-bomb Japan back to scorched earth instead? Would that have been a morally preferable option?
Posted by: Forbidden
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August 6, 2010 2:18 PM
I think anyone saying dropping the bomb was a bad idea is terribly naive. Too many people have this notion that war is nice and clean and everyone is reasonable. I think it's Television. WW2 was a nasty affair. The don't call it Total War for nothing.
Look at the last few islands we took. Look at Iwo Jima. Iwo Jima was a spec of an island. An Iwo Jima invasion the size of Japan is too terrible to contemplate. The Island of Japan is a fortress.
I remember reading the account of Japan's top physicist after Hiroshima. The military flew him to the scene and asked him if he had six months, could he create such a weapon. That's how long they thought they could hold out UNDER NUCLEAR BOMBARDMENT. Six Months of nuclear bombardment. That's how fanatical they were.
The simple fact is that those two bombs saved more lives that just about anything else outside of pandemic cures. Not just millions of American and Japanese lives, but those two bombs prevented a World War 3, which would surely have occurred against Stalin, claiming hundreds of millions of lives, instead of the tens of millions that WW2 claimed.
The idea that a demonstration would work is laughable. The actual devastation wasn't that amazing by WW2 standards. Look at the pictures of Dresden and other mass bombing targets. The only difference is that it took one bomb instead of hundreds or thousands over days or weeks, but that doesn't matter to the people who are getting killed. Both will kill you just as surely.
Without nuclear weapons, we would have carpet bombed Japanese cities, just as we did European cities. And get rid of this notion that it was somehow especially punishing. If we had wanted to punish the Japanese people, it wouldn't have been two military targets, but we would have hit Tokyo. Tokyo was primarily residential and mostly wood. The whole city would have turned into a fireball.
Posted by: hyman.rosen
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August 6, 2010 2:21 PM
"Katyn"
That, and the systematic and organized mass rape that goes on in many places at war. A better, because more morally ambiguous, example is the eradication of the Tamil insurgency in Sri Lanka.
It isn't to say that you do not add your own moral code into the stew of considerations involved in selecting a war action, as well as the likely reactions of others to your choices.
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 2:21 PM
It's just a shame this approach didn't extend to prior to dropping nukes on cities (or firebombing cities for that matter).
So, they weren't impressed by Hiroshima, one can probably assume then that Nagasaki didn't impress them either (being smaller and all), which means that in terms of ending the war neither nuke did a damn thing.
This falls on its ass when you consider that the timing of the bombing was set to maximize civilian casualties, and when you consider that the next ~50 biggest Japanese cities had already been put to the torch rendering any military or strategic targets in Japan irrelevant. Or if you consider that the allied bombing strategy pioneered by such humanitarians as "Bomber Harris" was categorically one of bombing the bejesus out of the civilian population in order to terrorize them into defeat - a pattern which played out over Europe and Japan up to the point that nukes were dropped - I see no reason to believe that the dropping of nukes was anything other than the continuation of a pattern of terrorist attacks with spectacularly low impact on the outcome of the war.
Posted by: pasadena beggar
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August 6, 2010 2:26 PM
instead leapt at the chance to kill civilians with the first bomb as a demonstration, was a moral failure on our part
This is not disputable. We had many, many moral failings in the 40's--the way we treated our own citizens then shocks the conscience. We treated African Americans like they were animals. Why would we hesitate to use a fun, untested new weapon on an enemy--even if we had reason to know that it would kill hundreds of thousands of people in a particularly horrible way?
Posted by: Forbidden
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August 6, 2010 2:27 PM
You're thinking of civilians in today's terms. In a Total War Scenario, are the factory workers who build the bombs and bullets that kill your soldiers civilian?When you have the entire economy of a nation devoted to war, actual civilians are few and far between.
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 2:27 PM
I believe you mean we would have continued to carpet bomb Japanese cities. Japan was a smoldering ruin by the time the nukes were dropped. Tokyo would have been hard to turn into a fireball as all combustible materials in that city had already been incinerated by bombing raids. At this time Tokyo was primarily charcoal (so perhaps it would have burned some). We did want to punish the Japanese people. We burned the absolute buggery out of the country - all we did was shift from doing this with lots of bombs and phosphorous to doing this with a single plane Uranium and Plutonium - shift up the periodic table and reduce your overheads in terms of materials used (bomb notwithstanding)
Posted by: Sal Bro
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August 6, 2010 2:27 PM
It seems really inappropriate, on this day, to be engaged in a bunch of back-and-forth about whether dropping an A-bomb on Hiroshima was "justified". There are 363 days of the year besides Aug 6 and 9 to quibble over facts and opinions.
The fact remains that tens of thousands of people were incinerated 65 years ago today due to human action. Regardless of who, how, or why, the horrors of this event are unimaginable. Whether or not you think this was justified, show a little fucking remorse over the fact that human action has led to such large loss of life.
Posted by: Ken
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August 6, 2010 2:27 PM
Why not pick a military target?
Nagasaki was a military target -- its shipyards were established in the 1800s. Considering that Japan was an island nation & depended on its ships to wage a war it initiated & was pursuing aggressively, attacking a major shipyard & the shipyard's supporting infrastructure makes a lot of military sense.
Posted by: blockhead
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August 6, 2010 2:28 PM
Yes, we could have block-aided Japan for another few years had we been so inclined. But this "option" is not really, because the American public would not have accepted it. Its naive, and has no consideration of historial context and reality at that time.
Posted by: synackaon.myopenid.com
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August 6, 2010 2:29 PM
@Marco #238
It wasn't racism, you moron.
He said that a lot of people died. None of our people died. By the basic objectives in war, the preservation of your people, it was a success.
Posted by: UberAlles
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August 6, 2010 2:29 PM
"This was an act of callous terrorism."
Hardly. 2 Nukes and the Japanese government still did not surrender. Only when the threat of Russian invasion & occupation did they capitulate. . .
Posted by: Moira Manion
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August 6, 2010 2:32 PM
P.Z., my father was a survivor of Santo Thomas Internment Camp in Manila. He was born on Mindano, of an American father and Filipino mother. The family had a coconut and cattle plantation. He was 12 when the Japanese invaded, indiscriminately killing civilians as they went. My father's family, the Manions, fled into the jungles of the mountains. At one point, my 12 year old father had to shoot a Japanese soldier directly in the face to keep him from slaughtering the family. Being Catholic, his family was also afraid of the Muslim Moros who lived in the mountains. They finally decided to surrender to the Japanese, who took them to Manila, where the University of Santo Thomas had been turned into a camp.
My father was there for three years. The Japanese would throw babies up into the air and skewer them on their bayonets, in front of the babies' families. They raped and left victims to die. Internees starved --my father became obsessed with food for the rest of his life-- or died of horrible, untreated diseases. My father saw atrocies on a daily basis, which haunted him with nightmares until he died. The Japanese showed no pity, mercy or compassion. As American troops approached, the Japanese planned to slaughter everyone in the camp, men, women, children, babies, and leave their bodies to welcome their would-be liberators. By great good luck, the Americans arrived one day before the Japanese thought they would, and the mass slaughter was prevented.
Japan had three opportunities to surrender to America. They refused. America warned Japan that if they did not surrender, a horror would be brought upon them. It was known that if Japan had the bomb, they would have used it on D.C. and New York and London with no hesitation, no warning. Japan refused to surrender. It was then that the bombs were dropped.
Japan did not hesitate to turture, rape, garrot, eviserate, stab, burn and shoot innocent civilians in China, Australia, the South Pacific, and the Philipines. Japan has never admited to their war atrocies, even when face to face with survivors who've demanded apologies. Japan has never apologized. But Japan is very good at playing the victim. And Americans are only too eager to feel sorry for them. America has given millions of dollars to revive Japan. It gave little to nothing to the Philipines, whose people were in Hell, yet who bravely fought at the side of Americans. We don't have any memorials to them.
I saw what my father suffered for 6 decades after he was liberated from Santo Thomas at 15. Spare me your morosness over what Japan went through.
This article doesn't go into the true horrors of the camp, but it's an overview. Those boys in the Front Gate photo may well have been my father and uncle. http://www.cnac.org/emilscott/santotomas01.htm
Posted by: dckolb
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August 6, 2010 2:32 PM
@Ewan
"So, they weren't impressed by Hiroshima, one can probably assume then that Nagasaki didn't impress them either (being smaller and all), which means that in terms of ending the war neither nuke did a damn thing."
Talk about reductio ad absurdium - the combination of the bombs clearly had an effect - Japan surrendered shortly after Nagasaki, but only because the combination made Hirohito overrule the military and order an unconditional surrender. The idiocy of PZ and others admonitions about "demonstrations" is that it's not theoretical, a demonstration right on their doorstep didn't work so a "demonstration" on a remote atoll would have been worse than useless as it would clearly not have done any good and would have wasted one of the two atomic bombs in existence.
"timing of the bombing was set to maximize civilian casualties,"
Unless you know of some time when a majority of the population of the city would be out of the city, there is no time that can be said to "maximize" or "minimize" civilian casualties in this case.
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 2:32 PM
Bizarrely in war the best way to stifle production isn't to kill the producers but to destroy the means of production - factories, access to resources, means of getting these resources to the troops.
Consciously choosing the time of day when the maximum number of civilians (and yes, even under your 'total war' scenario I classify these people as civilians) are in your blast radius doesn't speak to me of an attempt to do anything other than inspire terror.
Posted by: Gregory Greenwood
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August 6, 2010 2:36 PM
Whenever I contemplate the existence of nuclear weapons I experience the renewal of my fear that humans as a species are collectively insane.
I have spent my entire life living under the spectre of a very real, non-sky-fairy induced armageddon in the form of a nuclear apocalypse.
By our own hand, our species exists with a veritable Sword of Damoclese hanging over it ever single day.The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki demonstrates the obscene destructiveness and indiscriminate horror of 'A' bombs, and the weapons have become even more monstrously powerful since.
In the intervening sixty-odd years we seem to have learned very little. For all the SALT treaties and (still unratified by the US at this time) Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, nuclear proliferation continues, and countries like the US, Russia, the UK, France et al maintain their arsenals.
We may have been lucky enough to avoid full-scale nuclear war thus far, but every year that passes increases the risk of a worst-case scenareio. With countries like North Korea and Iran pursuing nuclear weapons, and emergeant nuclear powers like India and Pakistan constantly saber-rattling at one another, I have to wonder how long it will be before our luck runs out.
If the governments of the world's nuclear powers were less wedded to a Cold War mindset, then it might be possible that they could co-operate on a world-wide network of technologies that could counter any ICBMs launched by so-called 'rogue states'. Nuclear terrorism, while a terrible concept, needs to be kept in proportion as a threat. It can be countered by border radiological detection technologies and counter-terrorist groups, though it is certain that rightwingers will use the threat to try to justify a maintainance of a nuclear capacity as a deterent, even though the risk of a nuclear engagement is unacceptable.
Having pulled the teeth of any dictators or juntas looking to join the nuclear club in order to throw their weight around, the existing nuclear powers could publically and verifibly dismantle their own nuclear arsenals, and this nightmare could finally end. Unfortunately, I am yet to see any politician anywhere in the world who seems credibly intent on pursuing such a course of action.
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 2:38 PM
It's arguable that they did not. The Russians entered the war against them. They surrendered - their diplomatic connect to the rest of the world finally severed.
The war was coming to an end anyway - I think it's a mistake to make the connection between these two bombs being dropped and the end of the conflict - bombing raids of similar magnitude had been carried out across Japan with no similar effect - why fear the fact such destruction can be doled out by a single plane when your enemy has near limitless resources to do the same to you by conventional means?
Posted by: John Williamson
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August 6, 2010 2:39 PM
There were only two bombs available, so using them for demonstration purposes would have been to take a great risk. 2. Evidence is preponderantly on the side of heavy casualties on both sides if the U.S. had invaded, so there was a benefit to both sides in having a quick end without the invasion. 3. I note that in a lot of arguments, there seems to be dismay that the U.S. didn't make the "perfect decision". Even if the U.S. decision favored expediency - advantageous to them - one must recall that a) they were not the original aggressors; b) the Japanese committed hideous atrocities against military and civilians in many countries; c) the cruelty of the Japanese rampage of conquest was predicated on their belief that their weaponry could not be surpassed - in other words, "they could get away with it" - and this assumption was a major miscalculation; d) as the original aggressors with so much blood on their hands, it seems strange that the Japanese might have expected that they be treated with perfect fairness by an enemy whom they attacked without warning, and whose soldiers, sailors and marines died by the thousands trying to stop in their entirely unjustified quest for world domination. e) the Japanese leadership might also have looked at the situation in Germany, where Dresden was incinerated just a few months before. Surely they must have understood that if the Americans would do that to the German populace, Japan risked the same. And so perhaps the U.S decision is not the "perfect decision" that so many would have preferred, but had the U.S and Japan been able to work out a set of ground rules ahead of time, I think the first rule the U.S. would have suggested would have been , "Let's not have a war in the first place." But the U.S was never given that option; nor was Britain, Poland, the Soviet Union, China, France or Singapore. And so, in the final analysis, after propping up the Soviet Union and Britain at great cost to its own merchant fleet, after pouring out its treasure to build its great armies and navies, after conducting one costly campaign after another in Africa, Italy, France, and all over the Pacific, usually commencing with a bloody landing from sea, the United States created a weapon that could end the war quickly. They warned the Japanese, but the Japanese turned a deaf ear. And so the weapon was used and the war ended. One factor in the decision of the emperor to concede defeat was the realization that his own country had nothing to fight with except large numbers of people and conventional weapons. The U.S had more arrows in its quiver than the Japanese were aware of, a phenomenon which is very demoralizing to an opponent; and the U.S. was willing to return cruelty with cruelty. A second factor in the emperor’s decision was the realization that if he did not surrender, Tokyo would be next. The emperor might have been willing to surrender the lives of millions of his citizens, but certainly not his own. Sacrifice had its limits. If the Japanese wish to blame anybody, they have only themselves to blame. When one starts a war and conducts it so cruelly, one has no right to complain that one is treated in turn with great cruelty by an enemy who is stronger that one had expected. When one treats the world with utter immorality for many years, one can hardly complain when a decision against oneself is made which is of questionable morality. And this brings me to my final point: was the use of the atomic weapon immoral? In the days of body armor, the knights on horseback tried to outlaw the crossbow, because it went right through armor and killed the knight. The development of the crossbow was considered inhumane, because the knight could not survive this development. This has always been the nature of war. In the final analysis, the Japanese lost for the same reason that every other nation loses wars: they underestimated the capabilities of the enemy, and they expected to set the rules. In both instances, they were very much surprised with how things turned out.
Posted by: Yubal
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August 6, 2010 2:41 PM
...sacrificing Japanese lives. What I hate most about this stupid rhetoric is, that it is A) Racist. Since it implies that an American Person is more precious than a Japanese Person. B) The people who actually died were ~100% innocent. Almost all of them were civilians, women children, old men and a few workers who did not had to fight in the army. If you want to defeat the Japanese, fine. But get your soldiers to fight their soldiers. And if many of your soldiers die, so let it be. Soldiers are supposed to die in order to archive victory. That's part of their job.America could have won that war without bombing civilians, neither nuclear or conventional. There is no glory in that victory, it was just a shame and nothing but a war crime.
Posted by: synackaon.myopenid.com
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August 6, 2010 2:41 PM
I agree with Moira Manion (#257).
The time for compassion had passed. The time for forcing absolute and unconditional surrender had come.
Had America the nuclear weapons earlier, it would have used it on Germany without hesitation.
Yes, it is terrorism. All war is terrorism.
There is no humanity during war, only after it. That is because war is fundamentally anti-humanity, against who we are as a social species.
Never again should anyone ever be forced to use nuclear weapons again. Never again.
Posted by: lose_the_woo
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August 6, 2010 2:42 PM
Well Matt, I won't reiterate my point. I reject your accusation has disproportionate and perhaps could have been more explicit with context. I am however able to admit that I may be misinformed to a greater or lesser extent on this, and many other issues. That does not constitute dishonesty. I think I can confidently say that we both despise using dishonesty in an effort to bolster one's position.
Posted by: blockhead
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August 6, 2010 2:42 PM
Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both military targets.
Japan's oldest city and greatest cultural center Kyoto was considered as the A bomb target, but was spared by US planners in part because US war planners thought it would be a rallying point for the Japanese, and in part because there was no military value.
Posted by: synackaon.myopenid.com
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August 6, 2010 2:45 PM
Yubal@263
How many times must I hammer it in?
It was them and us. No racism there - they could have been our own people and we still would have dropped the bomb on them.
Posted by: Moira Manion
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August 6, 2010 2:49 PM
Yubal (#263), Japan murdered hundreds of thousands of innocent civilian men, women, children and babies, who never threatened them. Let's hear you cry over them.
Posted by: Steven Mading
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August 6, 2010 2:50 PM
The claim that is often used is that the only motivation for using the atomic bombs was to scare the Japanese high command into surrender when they otherwise would have fought to the bitter end with every last man. The overwhelming power that the atom bomb holds, it was said, would be a way to help the Japanese high command bypass their cultural taboo against surrender. It was thought they would be more willing to surrender if the force they were facing was so obviously overpowering that they wouldn't feel as much shame in having to surrendering to it.
I would have been more willing to take this argument seriously if not for the fact that people who put if forth like to gloss over and ignore one really really important point: August 6th and August 9th are only 3 days apart.
That's right. 3 days between the bomb at Hiroshima and the bomb at Nagasaki.
3 Days is not enough time to turn around an entire country's policy, especially a country with a communications and transport system already wrecked by previous bombings. If the intent had been to really scare the Japanese high command into adopting a policy of surrender, they would have been given more than 3 days to learn the full extent of what happened at Hiroshima. To let the true horror sink in, and to let the ponderous government make the agonizing decision. None of the High command themselves actually had seen the damage with their own eyes yet when the second bomb was dropped. They had only been told reports over radio transmissions.
The claim that the motivation was a humanitarian one to try to scare the Japanese into surrender faster with less causualties is not consistent with the eager quickness with which the second bomb was dropped so soon after the first. If your goal is to terrorize someone into surrender, you give them time to react to the new facts that change the situation. Especially when those new facts include the first EVER instance of a new weapon that nobody had seen before.
I'd be more willing to listen to the argument that the atom bombs were humanitarian surrender inducers only if the Nagasaki drop had been scheduled for a few weeks after the Hiroshima drop, only after there would have been plenty of time to make it clear that the Hiroshima drop was not going to result in a surrender by itself. That fact that it was only 3 days afterward destroys that argument, as far as I'm concerned.
Posted by: lorianneparker
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August 6, 2010 2:51 PM
Hiroshima in America: 50 Years of Denial by Robert Lifton is worth the read.
Posted by: Carlie of the lacy, gently wafting adjectives
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August 6, 2010 2:51 PM
How about children, you fucking moron?
Posted by: blockhead
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August 6, 2010 2:53 PM
Some of the Japanese in power were interested in diplomacy. But the military was not. Those who tried to get messages through to the West via Russia risked their lives at the hands of their own soldiers. And failed due to Stalin's duplicity. The US was looking for any sign from Japan that it would negotiate, but none were plain enough because thoses willing to talk feared for their live. not black or white. Not simple. Multi causal and a stew of factors. History is not simple.
Posted by: McCthulhu is taking ∞ to eat all the pi
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August 6, 2010 2:53 PM
This is probably one of those boring repeats by another 'late to the thread' jerks, but oh well...
FAUX Nooz had a story about how angry the son of the pilot of Enola Gay was that Obama had the audacity to go to Japan and take part in Japanese ceremonies remembering victims of the two atomic bombings. Oh! How horrible! People actually get past wartime animosity and have sympathy for civilians who died horribly! That Obama must be a SOCIALIST!!! Fuuuuuuu*bleep*!
Someone nearer the front of the thread pondered the obvious question of why the Japanese didn't surrender immediately after the first bomb went off. If I remember my history (channel) correctly, the thing going on with the Japanese public was basically the equivalent of extremist religion with the Emperor as the sole reason for existence. The warriors and their centuries old codes of honour and obeisance to the Emperor meant it was more worthy to die than surrender, regardless of how horrific the deaths or how numerous. I think it was the Emperor who had to persuade most of the Army and what remained of the Navy commanders to capitulate, rather than watch his country get turned into a glow-in-the-dark swimming pool. Fundamentalist extremism is the same as it ever was...same as it ever was...
Posted by: CherryBombSim
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August 6, 2010 2:56 PM
It is impossible to have a constructive debate about the morality of the decision to use nuclear weapons if people start their arguments with statements like "The Japanese would have surrendered anyway." "The Japanese would have surrendered if there were a demonstration detonation." or "The Japanese would not have surrendered without the bombings." These are questions we can discuss, but the answers are unknowable for certain.
A more useful question to debate might be: "Given that the leaders in the U.S. did *not* believe that the Japanese would surrender without an invasion, was it morally justifiable to use nuclear weapons instead.?" It would cut out a lot of the baseless assertions that such-and-such *would* have happened if only etc. etc.
Posted by: Aratina Cage
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August 6, 2010 2:57 PM
Yubal #263, I agree. The people who died in the nuclear blasts and from the nuclear fallout and radiation sickness and genetic diseases due to the radiation were not the ones responsible for the war crimes being committed overseas by the Japanese military.
Posted by: msironen
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August 6, 2010 2:57 PM
A) Complete misrepresentation of 95%+ of the people you're criticizing,
B) Abysmal historical ignorance of the reality of war time Japan.
Yeah, if only we could agree on some remote location to send our soldiers to kill each other. Especially since failure to reach such an agreement could result in up to 100000 civilian casualties like at Okinawa.
Posted by: Moira Manion
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August 6, 2010 3:04 PM
lorianneparker @ #270: How about Japan in WWII: 50 Years of Denial?
Survivors have demanded that Japan apologize for its war atrocities. The survivors are always ignored.
How about America erecting a memorial to the Filipino civilians (not soldiers, but everyday farmer, bankers, lawyers, and others) who fought alongside our troops? How about we spend some time and money thanking them? Children in America are taught to fold paper cranes in memory of Japanese dead, over to remember the Holocaust. China, Australia, the South Pacific experienced their own holocaust, unprovoked, at the hands of the Japanese, but we don't remember them.
I swear. Everyone here who apologizes to Japan for the bombs needs to talk to a survivor of what Japan did to innocent people. that is, before they're all dead and can't be living witnesses any more.
Posted by: blockhead
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August 6, 2010 3:05 PM
There was a strong component of racism in the Asian theater not found in Europe theater--on both sides. Japan remains, arguably, the most racist country in the world today.
Did this contribute to the brutality of the air war against Japan, including the decision to use the bomb? Probably. But so did the cultural gap that convinced a high proportion of Japanese soldiers to fight to the death, their brutal military training that beat them silly on the slightest infraction, the war atrocites committed against civilian and military persons, all very well known to our soldiers and military commanders.
Racism is just another way to find difference and hate. It was just a part of the mess.
Posted by: Penny
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August 6, 2010 3:05 PM
#263
How is a conscript different to a factory worker in wartime? Neither will have had much of a choice in what they do.
Saying it would have been OK for soldier to die instead of civilians is...well, words fail me.
Posted by: Yubal
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August 6, 2010 3:07 PM
#268 Moira Manion,
I understand your statement like this:
"If they can kill innocent people, so can we."
So let us become even more unjust, cruel, brutal butchers then they are? Maybe in hope someone might stop ourselves one day on the basis and with the motivation of our high esteemed values we liked to propagate before we became like the fascist we promised to fight?
Please correct me if I am wrong there, but that's how these ridiculously stupid attempts of relativism sound to me.
Mass Murder is always wrong, and let me quote Nietzsche here (non literally) "It is not the good cause that worthies the deed, it is the good deed that worthies the cause"
#267 synackaon.myopenid.com
I don't see what kind of difference it would make.
Posted by: Tim
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August 6, 2010 3:08 PM
Given that surrender by a soldier was considered a disgrace, it seems doubtful that a few repatriated POW's would influence the Japanese military command. Most likely, they'd be shot as cowards or traitors. If you couldn't get Hirohito himself to watch it, a demonstration would be useless.
I was alive at the time, and I can tell you that the country was plenty pissed. That's no excuse for what happened, but anybody who squandered half our nukes on a failed demo would not be looked on kindly.
Posted by: Yubal
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August 6, 2010 3:11 PM
Penny,
Can you agree on the idea that during a war soldiers are never supposed to kill civilians but soldiers and soldiers only?
How else would there be a fight if soldiers would not kill anybody (Which would be my preferred scenario but in this case we could also abolish war right away)
Posted by: moderation
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August 6, 2010 3:11 PM
PZ Myers: you would be livid if some alt med nut was commenting on a subject with the level of rank speculation you just used. Your argument maybe valid, but you should back up your claim with at least some cursory evidence. Unless, that is, your claim is that under NO circumstances could the use of the bomb EVER be justified.
The citizenry of Japan viewed the emperor as an infalible god and his generals as his devine representatives. Up until the bombs hit, most civilians believed that Japan was on the verge of winning the war as per the propaganda of the military. You note in your blog frequently the blind obedience of deist and the extremes to which they will go.
For those who doubt the US Govt reasons for using the bomb, what do you feel their actual motivation was? Experimentation with the bomb? Racism (don't forget the firebombing of Dresden, though)?
Posted by: Forbidden
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August 6, 2010 3:15 PM
So you leave the people alive to build another factory? You think they'd just sit around and do nothing after a factory is blown up? Nevermind that daylight bombing is ten times more humane than nighttime bombing. Why? Because when you hit it during the day, you have a much better chance of actually hitting the factory, rather than any random building in the city.They didn't have GPS back then. You had to go during the day, or you had no idea whatsoever if you actually hit anything worth hitting.
Show me a bomb or gun or other means of stopping a total war economy that doesn't kill children and I will gladly put that forth as the best option. Unfortunately, no such thing exists. War is terrible. Total War is an abomination. But Total War is what we found ourselves in.I'm sorry if that offends your morals, but we didn't choose that war. I am the first to abhor any call for war. But once you're in war, you can't hold back. Every time you hold back, it merely prolongs it. And every day the war continues brings more dead. Would you have the war continue so that those children could grow up enough to pick up a gun and die on the battlefield? Or is it not better to end the war quickly, even if that means some innocents die? It's not a fun choice. No right-thinking person chooses it out of glee.
It's like the old scifi classic "The Cold Equations". In War, you are faced with those Cold Equations every day. The is no perfectly moral outcome.
I understand why people get so morally outraged about nuclear weapons. I'm glad we have a society where people can think that way. But all the moral indignation is the world does not change the equations. Morality cannot override mathematics.
And is that not what this site is all about? Your moral indignation is no different than the eucharist. Another form of woo you cling to because you cannot face the cold equations of war.
Posted by: Penny
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August 6, 2010 3:19 PM
Yubal
War is inhuman anyway...
If a soldier killing factory workers means that new weapons are not built that continue the war, then why is it any worse than killing the people who will be wielding those weapons?
Whole countries were at war.
One life shouldn't be worth more than another. A conscript's life shouldn't be worth less because he had the misfortune to be drafted.
What if civilians are resisting invading soliders? In your view, would it be OK to kill them then? Or should the soldiers not fire back, because they're not supposed to kill civilians?
I'm not saying it's OK to kill civilians. There isn't an answer, except no war. Killing civilians isn't right, but killing soldiers isn't either.
Sorry if this is a little muddled - one glass of wine too many.
Posted by: Aratina Cage
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August 6, 2010 3:21 PM
List of war apology statements issued by Japan
Posted by: Penny
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August 6, 2010 3:25 PM
#285
Just to clarify - I'm not arguing specifically about the nuclear bombs here, but about some of the comments that seem to be saying that invading Japan would have been better because even thought similar numbers of lives would have been lost, they would have been soldiers, not civilians, so that makes it not quite so bad.
Posted by: MrFire
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August 6, 2010 3:27 PM
The most pathetic and spurious tu quoque argument I've seen in a long time.
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 3:28 PM
Yes, absolutely. Then I'd blow that one up. If my enemy wants to utilize all its resources building factories then so be it. Awesome. Every Tonne of steel that goes to building tank factories is a tonne of steel that doesnt go towards building tanks.This makes sense in terms of dropping bombs which are designed to take out buildings, or clusters of buildings. When you have a bomb designed to take out a small city your chances of missing are relatively slim.
Also it's not like rush hour is the only time there's light to bomb by in Japan, it is however the best time to catch most of the population of the city completely without protection so as to absolutely positively vaporize as many people as possible.
None of the terrorist bombings during WWII brought the war to a close. This was first illustrated when Hitler decided that rather than bombing the means of production he'd bomb the civilian population of the UK into submission - awesome move, motivated a whole country against him - likewise the firebombing of Europe - didn't impact the German war machine, did cement the propaganda that the allied forces were monsters - didn't work in Japan when a campaign which wiped out many major cities in Japan apparently left the Japanese high command in no mood to capitulate - there's no compelling evidence that the nukes did a damn thing in this respect - numbers game I'm afraid - Russia, who have the numbers, and zero fear of burning through their whole population to subjugate the enemy turned from non-combatant (as regards Japan) to enemy - Japan promptly capitulated because the whole make them pay in blood for every inch of Japanese soil was a meaningless approach to take against the Russians who proved on the Eastern front that if using soldiers bodies to soak up your enemies ammunition reserves is what it takes to win a war then by jove thats what the Russians'll do.
Posted by: CJO
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August 6, 2010 3:30 PM
Morality cannot override mathematics.
BS. Before one even can get to the level of the "equations" one has to settle on the definition of the problem to be solved, and that involves moral reasoning at the very outset. Mathematics is a tool; so is an atomic bomb. How we choose to employ our tools involves morality, ineluctably.
The[re] is no perfectly moral outcome.
Cynical essentialism, and a complete refusal to accept that these considerations lie on a continuum. That perfect morality is impossible says exactly nothing about what are the better and worse moral choices in a given situation. In practice, this assertion is just an excuse to do whatever is expedient, whatever one wanted to do in the first place and morality be damned.
Posted by: Yubal
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August 6, 2010 3:37 PM
A civilian who fights does not exist.
If you fight you are a soldier (in uniform) or a partisan (not in uniform) but in both cases a combatant and therefore part of the war.
If your hometown is invaded by a hostile army and you failed to flee into safety, you are strongly advised to collaborate in order to minimize the loss of life.
Again, if you are stupid enough to pick up a gun, don't cry if somebody is shooting at you, you could have avoided that by staying home, pretending to be handicapped or going to jail instead.
One day I need to study the category of faulty arguments so I can simply state their name in a comment and thereby cutting on my writing time.
Posted by: blockhead
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August 6, 2010 3:42 PM
The mechanics of warfare. The most brutal with the best resources wins, whether in the 20th century or the 7th century. That was WWII.
Morality in war. There is none. Anytime someone goes easy on the opponent its public relations, not morality. Leaders who make war are not moral and do not know the meaning of the word.
Which is (arguably) why we lost in Vietnam and why we are losing in Iraq and Afghanistan today. We refuse to be totally brutal because our citizans can SEE. In WWII, films and accounts were censored to keep the homefront from seeing.
Most soldiers in war are fueled by fear, hatred, and soldiarity with their immediate fellows. Morality and philosophy rather unimportant compared to getting home alive and propagating.
Posted by: Penny
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August 6, 2010 3:42 PM
So making guns/bullets/tanks for the soldiers is OK, and gives you civilian 'must not be shot' status, whereas actually pointing a gun removes that right?
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 3:48 PM
I don't get all the people saying that killing civilians is perfectly acceptable. You do realize that you're justifying the morality of the 9/11 attackers, don't you?
Posted by: Harry Tuttle
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August 6, 2010 3:49 PM
It was not an act of terrorism, it was an act of Total War.
Terrorism is usually a means to goad an enemy into doing something stupid. Total warfare is a means to destroy a nation's capability and will to fight.
Somewhere between 35 and 50 million civilians were killed during WWII (add in another 22-26 million for combat deaths). THAT is total warfare. And it is far, far more reprehensible than any act of terrorism ever committed.
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 3:50 PM
Pretty much yes.
Target the means of production. Not the producers. In my opinion if you bomb a factory in which the workers happen to be this is more moral (shades of gray remember) than bombing the workers outside of the factory. In the first instance the workers are collateral damage rather than directly targetted (although it'd be better to bomb when you know the factory is uninhabited - this is likely not very often during times when bombing it accurately is an option)
Although this is kinda besides the point when discussing a bomb which was targetted when the maximum number of people were outdoors for easy incineration and which had all the precision of Dick Cheney.
Frankly by the point in the war that had been reached when the nukes were dropped there wasn't really any reason to go about bombing Japanese military in Japan either - waiting for the Russians to overtly make a move was pretty much all that was required.
Posted by: blockhead
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August 6, 2010 3:51 PM
"I swear. Everyone here who apologizes to Japan for the bombs needs to talk to a survivor of what Japan did to innocent people.
The most pathetic and spurious tu quoque argument I've seen in a long time."
It an argument from emotional appeal, not fact or knowledge, just like PZ's original post.
Posted by: Copyleft
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August 6, 2010 3:52 PM
Then let me help. It is the purpose of having a military.
The reason soldiers exist is that it's THEIR job to fight for us. And their job is to fight OTHER soldiers. And leave civilians strictly alone.
Does that mean that a soldier's life is valued less than a civilian's? You bet. That's exactly what it means. Is that sick, unfair, and tragic? Yes, which is why wars should be avoided at all costs.
But once a state of war exists: soldiers fight so civilians can live. Them's the rules.
Posted by: Doug
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August 6, 2010 3:53 PM
Whoa, there, this is a huge sweeping generalization. Most strategic bombing was intended both the reduce production of war material and to terrorize and subdue the population. Post war data suggests that strategic bombing in Germany did reduce industrial production somewhat, but production of tanks and planes increased in every year of the war. However, bombing reduce oil production capability to virtually nil, and therefore substantially hastened the end of the war. It's effects on civilians were probably mixed, but that's tough to measure. Regardless of the fact, though, remember that the Allies did not have access to this information! They didn't really know how well the bombing campaigns were working. There were no satellites for bomb damage assessment in those days, and the available photography wasn't that good, either. Nobody really knew how much stuff was being produced. The situation in Japan was similar -- no one really knew.
Posted by: Forbidden
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August 6, 2010 3:55 PM
This statement comes from the world where America is the superpower bullying a weak nation. This was not the case in WW2. Every bombing mission had in a cost in your own life and material. For the night-time British Bombers, the casualty rate was 45%. War isn't a video game. You can't just magically blow it up again. and that would apply if the bombs dropped were Fusion Bombs. They weren't. They were Fission Bombs. Hiroshima is still there. As terrible a weapon as they are, fission bombs are not doomsday devices. Generally speaking, a fission bomb is measured in Kilotons, that is thousands of tons of tnt. Fusion bombs, the kind we employ today on ICBMs and Submarines are Fusion Bombs, rated in Megatons, that is millions of tons of tnt. Of course not. That's why the nuclear attacks on japan were not terrorist bombings, but specific attacks on military targets. But all the moral indignation in the world wouldn't have caused the Japanese to surrender. All the moral outrage in the world would not have stopped the bloodbath that an invasion of Japan would have caused.If it wasn't nukes, it would have had to have been something else. And everything else available would kill far more people and cause far more damage over far longer a time. That is the cold equation they were faced with.
In the story, the pilot had to space the girl. As morally horrible as spacing a young girl is, that was the most moral outcome of a list of bad outcomes. It's terrible. It would be great if it didn't have to happen. But no matter how many times you run the math, the equation comes up the same.
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 3:57 PM
Doug @299 - I'm not saying that the some of the bombing of Europe didn't effect the German war machine. Most of the reduction of industrial production bombing was likely succesful, hitting infrastructure involved in transport etc likewise likely succesful.
All the bombings focused on terrorizing the German population? Futile and evil. A piece of information clearly available to any allied commander who could remember as far back as the Blitz when Germany attempted exactly the same thing.
Posted by: blockhead
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August 6, 2010 3:57 PM
oops,
didn't finish 297
But its a valid argument because if you don't consider the context (what japan did to innocent people for YEARS before the Pearl harbor), then you don't understand why people made the decisions they made then, including using the A bomb.
Posted by: Forbidden
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August 6, 2010 4:00 PM
Not at all. We're arguing that in a Total War Scenario, that is, war where the entire economy of the country is focused on war, and that war of attrition is entirely probable, attacking the means of production of war material is not attacking a civilian target.If you can stop a war by killing the factory and workers that make the guns and bullets and bombs that the military uses to attack you, you win.
The people making the materials of war are not civilians in this scenario. They aren't innocent bystanders. They're part of the war machine.
Posted by: Doug
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August 6, 2010 4:02 PM
your comment reminded me of this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWTNBRs7Ccs
Seriously, though, your comment might have made sense at one time, but in today's world of wonders, there really aren't any rules. In a fight to the death, you have to win by any means possible. The best you can hope for is to survive long enough to feel remorse.
And in case you're wondering, I'm not condoning, just observing. I have a couple of scars from when I was one of the soldiers that you refer to, and I accept the fact that I volunteered to be a soldier. Still, to believe that somehow we can separate solidiers and civilians in the context of a total war like WWII is just unrealistic.
Posted by: Joffan
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August 6, 2010 4:02 PM
Let's just examine this proposal of a demonstration bomb a little further, because my instinct to reject the idea might be wrong, so ...
OK. Step one. Get some POWs (diplomats would not risk the penalties of cooperation), who we already know will be despised if and when they are returned to Japan, and stand them some distance from an atomic explosion. Clearly we don't want them too close, since they are witnesses... or perhaps we put half of them close enough to be killed, and get the other half to witness their dead bodies? No, I guess everyone had seen dead bodies at that stage of the war, so no great benefit there. Anyway, these selected POWs see a huge explosion say ten miles away. Then we drive them down into the blast area, show them the destroyed houses (which we must have built before, I guess - step zero) and tell them how bad the bomb is, promising faithfully that no additional explosives were planted to enhance the effect and the explosion was from a single bomb delivered by a single plane, plus lots of other stuff they can't directly check.
Then, step two - we send them back to Japan. By some lucky chance, not all of them are executed immediately for dishonorable behavior, and they testify to the high command about this new amazing weapon that the US have. This takes maybe two to three weeks to happen - meanwhile, half a million additional people have died in bombing raids on Japan, atrocities in China and Korea, etc.
Oh dear. This scenario DOES. NOT. WORK! Please consign it to the bin of "nice idea, but infeasible".
Posted by: Gaebolga
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August 6, 2010 4:03 PM
blockhead said:
[Emphasis mine]
I have to disagree with the highlighted sentence. While I certainly agree that most wars are unnecessary (and therefore immoral), it doesn't take much thought to imagine a scenario under which it isn't immoral to make war. Responding to an unporovoked invasion springs instantly to mind.
Just because a bunch of yahoos have taken it upon themselves to see every problem as a nail, that doesn't invalidate the hammer's usefulness (or morality) in certain instances.
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 4:05 PM
As applied to Japan in the months leading to Hiroshima and Nagasaki the casualty rate was nothing approaching 45%. Allied air superiority by this point had essentially turned the war into a video game - hence nukes could be dropped by a single plane - if there was any serious air defence possible then nukes would likely not have been utilized - you don't fly one of a handful of massively expensive WMDs over a target unless you have absolute certainty it's gonna work. By the end of WWII allied pilots could come back day in and day out to take out whatever target they wished with near certainty of zero interference from the enemy.
I don't believe I suggested they were doomsday devices. I suggested they had the power to take out "a small city" - I'd consider killing 125,000 people to be equivalent to taking out a small city. Missing by 5 city blocks would have made no difference to the impact of the nukes used in WWII.
Other than the fact that they were an extention of a terrorist campaign which rather than specifically attacking military targets burned cities to the ground by the score. For purpose of burning cities to the ground to inspire terror. Making them terrorist acts.
Posted by: Insightful Ape
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August 6, 2010 4:08 PM
It is hard to see how this person was part of the "Japanese Imperial Army".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sadako_Sasaki
Posted by: btthegeek
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August 6, 2010 4:08 PM
#291 Bullshit. That's the main problem with guerrilla/modern warfare, that you can't tell the civilians from the combatants by sight.
Brilliant plan by the way, pretending to be handicapped. Let me know exactly in what way I need to be handicapped in order to make someone shooting at me in a fucking war say "oh, you poor thing!" Asshole.
Or I can pretend to agree, and collaborate, and thereby help send my friends and family to their deaths. Way to take the ethical high ground.
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 4:10 PM
We're arguing that in a Total War Scenario,
Ok, that makes it all better. You're using Hitler's morality rather than bin Laden's. An upgrade I'm sure.
Posted by: Doug
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August 6, 2010 4:10 PM
Or, Allied commanders might just conclude that what was needed was different tactics. The failure of the blitz was largely due to the inability to suppress fighter resistance. In response to that, the Allies built a whole generation of long-range fighters to use as escorts (the P-51 was probably the best known). Again, you must always remember that we have the benefit of perfect hindsight. We know (or can find out) everything the people who actually fought the war did not know. We also have benefit of knowing that, whatever we think, our opinions have no adverse consequences for us or anyone else. Theirs did. They were making life and death decisions, we aren't. That's been my main point all along. Is what they did morally questionable? Certainly. Would I have done different? I don't know -- neither do you.
Posted by: Copyleft
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August 6, 2010 4:15 PM
No, no, and no again. Never. There are still rules--treaties we have signed onto, agreements we've made, and promises we've offered--and we will abide by them. They are the law of the land, despite Bush & Cheney's best efforts to cast them aside.
The man who says "whatever it takes" is a man undeserving of respect. Because that's a man without honor or principle... and once you abandon those, why do you deserve to win?
Posted by: blockhead
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August 6, 2010 4:16 PM
at 306
blockhead was having an emotional reaction based on social class, relative power and recent history.
I was too dogmatic.
Posted by: SQB (fuck death)
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August 6, 2010 4:17 PM
While the bombs may have been necessary, that doesn't mean you can't apologize. That is a separate issue.
It's also a separate issue from if, when and how often Japan has apologized.
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 4:19 PM
The failure of the blitz was that when you bomb a civilian population it inspires them not to surrender but to prevail.
This is the lesson Allied commanders had staring them in the face - being bombed hardened the British population against the Germans - what's bombing the Germans going to do?
Posted by: BrianX
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August 6, 2010 4:21 PM
I have to say I've always considered Hiroshima a necessary evil. I've wavered on Nagasaki -- it's possible the Japanese might have surrendered without the second bombing. And as gruesome as it was, it was in line with the scorched-earth doctrine the Allies used over Germany. In addition, there was the very real possibility (whether the US knew this at the time or not, I don't know) that a successful Operation Downfall invasion could have led to a divided Japan as the Soviets invaded Hokkaido on their own initiative.
It is, however, fair to ask if something else would have worked. The Japanese knew they had no hope and were shooting at best for a Pyrrhic victory for the US invaders. We will never know if the experience of Okinawa would have been repeated, or if the Japanese people would have folded under the onslaught. I'd be willing to wager the question can never really be answered.
Posted by: Gaebolga
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August 6, 2010 4:21 PM
Ewan R said:
According to Dictionary.com (available to everyone here, which is why I'm using it), the definition of terrorism is:
By definition #1, any military action short of total annihilation could be considered "terrorism," which kind of renders the term moot in this discussion. The "terrorist" act of firebombing cities in Japan and Germany was in response to "terrorist" acts by those countries' militaries.
Were such bombings necessary? Probably not.
Was the "terrorist" invasion of China necessary? Probably not.
Was the "terrorist" occupation of the Phillipines necessary? Probably not.
Can we all just assume that pretty much every military action by every side in WWII counts as a "terrorist" act and move on? Because these days, the term "terrorist" comes with a whole lot of emotional baggage that doesn't apply to this discussion at all.
Next thing you know, you'll be calling the Germans "Nazis" or something....
Posted by: msironen
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August 6, 2010 4:22 PM
"Ok, that makes it all better. You're using Hitler's morality rather than bin Laden's. An upgrade I'm sure."
Do we need to update Godwin's Law in case someone invokes both Hitler AND 9/11 / Al-Qaeda / Bin Laden in the same instance? Yes, it seems we do.
Posted by: BrianX
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August 6, 2010 4:23 PM
(I very much agree with one thing, though. Never again.)
Posted by: Doug
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August 6, 2010 4:24 PM
Perhaps it would be better to say, "in a fight to the death, you have to subdue and\or destroy your enemy by any means at your disposal." It's very nice to talk about principle and honor, but seriously, how important are those things when you're dead? Was the Ward Massacre an atrocity, or was it part of a desparate attempt by the Shoshone to hold back the tide of settlers that were taking the land they depended on to survive? Did the Shoshone that carried it our lose there honor or their integrity? Did they violate a principle? Did they deserve to lose?
Posted by: Crewvy
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August 6, 2010 4:26 PM
Get over it, it was war.
They would not have hesitated to use this technology if they had it.
20/20 hindsight is fucking useless.
Move on nothing to see here.
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 4:27 PM
I suppose that yes, by the dictionary definition all acts of war constitute terrorist acts. However I think a distinction between acts carried out specifically on the civilian population with the purpose of inspiring terror are seperable from acts carried out either tangentially on the civilian population to impact the war effort (blowing up the factory that happens to have civilians working in it at the time) or on the military of another country is perfectly acceptable in the context of the discussion and as such I'll coopt the word terrorist here particularly because of the emotional baggage attached - the acts which I am describing as terrorist are to me something completely other as compared to the general hum drum atrocity that is warfare.
Posted by: waynerobinson4
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August 6, 2010 4:28 PM
I personally think that the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were both justified.
Both saved allied and Japanese lives. The Japanese military were planning for a defence of the home islands expecting civilian deaths of the order of 3 million, hoping to inflict such heavy losses on invaders that would cause the allies to negotiate a peace treaty that would concede Japan some of its conquests.
Also the demonstrated horror of atomic weapons probably prevented them being used again. Conventional bombing of both Japanese and German cities actually in some cities caused more deaths than either of the nuclear bombs.
Two recent books; "Retribution" by Max Hastings and "Reaping the Whirlwind" by Barrett Tillman discuss the reasons for the two attacks.
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 4:32 PM
This doesn't jive.
The Japanese military were planning on a defence which would lead to approximately 3 million civilian deaths (and all the attendant horror that this entails)
Yet they capitulated because of just shy of 200,000 deaths because the explosions were big or something?
Posted by: Aaron Baker
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August 6, 2010 4:32 PM
Matt Penfold wrote:
"Ordeneus said:
It also ignores there was no real need to invade the Japanese home islands. The US and her allies could have pursued a policy of containment. The Japanese had no navy or airforce left capable of challenging the allies. The war in Europe was over, and assets used in the war were already being prepared to be sent to the Far-East."
.....................
No, no, and again no. There may have been feasible alternatives, as Myers argues, to using the atom bombs on two cities--but that argument again and again comes tied up with nonsense to the effect that the Japanese were about to surrender, or that the Allies should have merely contained them.
The official Japanese response to the Potsdam Declaration on July 26, 1945 was rejection on July 28. As the Japanese Prime Minister put it:
(The context here makes clear that this statement was a rejection--quite regardless of the exact nuance one attributes to the much debated mokusatsu.)It was only after the atom bombings (on August 6 and 9), and the Soviet invasion of Manchuria (August 9), that the Emperor broke a deadlock and announced Japan's surrender. That decision by Hirohito, incidentally, prompted an attempted coup which came very close to succeeding. Japan on the cusp of surrender is an unsubstantiated myth.
As for containing the Japanese, that was no doubt physically possible, but after six years of unsurpassed death and mayhem, which the Axis powers wantonly provoked, containing an Axis power was neither politically nor morally acceptable. The Allies would settle for nothing less than crushing the Axis, and they were entirely justifed in this, and justified in demanding unconditional surrender.
Posted by: Gaebolga
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August 6, 2010 4:33 PM
@ blockhead
We've all been there; no worries.
msironen said:
Perhaps that should be "Godwin's Second Law of Emotion."
Posted by: MrFire
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August 6, 2010 4:33 PM
No, it's a tu quoque argument. Moira Manion made it clear that we do not need to apologize for the bombs, because the Japanese did as bad, or worse. That does not follow.
You seem to be arguing that given the Japanese track record, bombing them was the best option for stopping them, which is a different argument. At least, that's the more generous interpretation of your words - I could instead see my way to surmise that you think we should have bombed them out of anger and revenge.
Posted by: Doug
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August 6, 2010 4:34 PM
So, failing to knock out the RAF had NOTHING to do with it? :)
It's been fun, but I have to run. I doubt we've really changed minds, but I respect your willingness to keep it civil.
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 4:37 PM
Doug - failure to knock out the RAF was a direct result of following the Blitz tactic rather than bombing means of production and military targets.
So I guess to an extent it failed because of this, but imo it was doomed to fail regardless - and as it wouldn't have been the same tactic if it had targetted the RAF rather than civilians well, I dunno how to approach that...
Posted by: Yubal
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August 6, 2010 4:46 PM
# 309 btthegeek
Why do you have to misunderstand my post on purpose?
I said, don't be a soldier/fighter. There are many ways to avoid that.
please don't use the word ethics, dickhead.
Posted by: Gaebolga
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August 6, 2010 4:48 PM
Ewan R said:
[Emphasis mine]
So here's the crux of the matter then: you believe that the primary purpose of the various bombings (both nuclear and fire) was to inspire terror. I strongly disagree; please note, however, that I'm not disagreeing that they were immoral acts, merely that they were primarily for the purpose of inspiring terror.
It seems unlikely to me that the US military gave any kind of damn whether or not Japanese civilians were terrorized; they were sending a message to their counterparts in the Japanese military and government, something along the lines of "you're going to lose, and you won't be taking any more of us with you, either."
Brutal and nasty? Sure.
Terrorism? Not really.
Posted by: feralboy12
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August 6, 2010 4:50 PM
America has always insisted that it is different than, and superior to, every nation state that ever existed. Liberty and justice for all, anyone? We claim the moral high ground. Always have. Every nation does when it goes to war, but the funny thing about WWII is we actually had that high ground--we were justified in going to war.
But the firebombings of Dresden and Tokyo and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki made no attempt to distinguish civilians from military at a time when the allies were in a position to do so, at least enough to avoid killing hundreds of thousands of civilians. This was not "total war;"
those civilians were being lied to, as they usually are, about the conduct and progress of the war. They were not willing combatants; they were not our enemy, the Japanese military was.
We were morally justified in going to war and our treatment of our defeated enemies defied historical precedent, and we can be proud of that.
But attacks like these bombings, which target civilians, cannot be justified by "it saved lives," "they started it," or "they should have given up." If you can justify them by saying they saved lives, you can justify anything. If you justify them by citing the actions of your enemies, you cannot claim moral high ground. And the civilians killed did not have the option of surrender.
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 4:52 PM
Do we need to update Godwin's Law in case someone invokes both Hitler AND 9/11 / Al-Qaeda / Bin Laden in the same instance? Yes, it seems we do.
Given that others brought up killing civilians as a method of reasonable way to fight a war and justified "total war", I'd say the Godwin had already happened, it just hadn't been acknowledged yet. Though I should have said Goebbels, since it was he, not Hitler, who spent his time babbling about "total war". So, ok, I'll admit being wrong there.
Posted by: Forbidden
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August 6, 2010 4:57 PM
This is not true at all. A single plane (or a trio, in this case), had a much better chance of getting through. They didn't have surface to air guided missiles. Fighting off aircraft entails it's own cost, which they would only do against a large group of bombers, figuring the trio were spotters, which they couldn't afford to react to at that point.But, again, how is this any different than the carpet bombing that inflicted a much greater toll on lives? It's because people here the word "Nuclear" and lose all sense of reality.
Because they were expecting those 3 million civilian deaths would have killed at least a million American soldiers (although, the Japanese leadership, being delusional, probably figured it their brave little samurais would kill 6 million americans).The Japanese leadership, throughout the war, were operating under the delusion that America would run scared if they inflicted enough damage. It was the thinking that lead to Pearl Harbor and every step of the war thereafter.
But with the possibility of nuclear bombardment, that changed. They could see that America wouldn't need to pay such a high cost in lives. They could sit back and every single bomber over Japan might just have one of those nukes on board.
Lastly, it must not be forgotten that the Germans had been working on nuclear weapons and before Berlin fell, had sent their nuclear research and materials to Japan (I seem to recall that the materials never actually reached Japan, but the American leadership couldn't know that). From the American leadership perspective, there was always the danger that Japan might construct it's own nuclear weapons.
And then there's Stalin, who didn't do much to hide his designs on world conquest. The more blood and material used against Japan, the less would be available to fight him.
The Americans had to end the war quickly. Yes, the weapons were terrible. But War is terrible. . Nuclear weapons were the cleanest way to end it, and saving more American and Japanese lives than any alternative scenario.
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 5:02 PM
The Americans had to end the war quickly. Yes, the weapons were terrible. But War is terrible. . Nuclear weapons were the cleanest way to end it, and saving more American and Japanese lives than any alternative scenario.
So...suppose the scenario was different. What if Japan had discovered atomic weapons in about 1942, when they still seemed to be winning or at least viable. Go even further and assume they could deliver at least 2 atomic bombs to major cities in the US. Maybe through their allies or something. Anyway, they drop a bomb on New York and Washington. Is that perfectly ok since they might reasonably believe that that would end the war early (especially if the US believed they had more)? It might well have resulted in fewer US casualties than continuing the war.
Posted by: msironen
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August 6, 2010 5:02 PM
Given that others brought up killing civilians as a method of reasonable way to fight a war and justified "total war", I'd say the Godwin had already happened, it just hadn't been acknowledged yet.
A gross misrepresentation or maybe misunderstanding of what is meant by "total war". Total war is a situation where the civilian population is deeply involved in the war effort, as was the case in WW2 Japan. If you're going fight a war, you can't not bomb military targets just because there are civilians working in them / living near them, as was the case with Hiroshima and Nagasaki. To refuse to do so is to basically capitulate to your enemy's despicable human shield strategy.
How exactly you manage to go from there to Hitler, 9/11 and Bin Laden is beyond my meager ken.
Posted by: David Marjanović
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August 6, 2010 5:03 PM
Have I finally caught up by reading all the way to comment 332?
What I've read elsewhere is similar to comments 16, 66 (comments to it included), 74, 84, 88, 132, 168, 225, and to some extent 138, 171, 246, 323, and 325. It says that the crazed Japanese leadership thought like this:
Premise 1: To vanquish Japan, you need to kill every last Japanese.
Premise 2: It is impossible to kill 120 million people.
Conclusion: Japan is invincible.
The nukes disproved Premise 2 in a very convincing way: with just a couple of bombs, it is entirely feasible to kill 120 million people.
(Note that Premise 1 was the actually crazy one; Premise 2 was merely wrong – but much more easily falsifiable.)
(...Further note that the entire Soviet Union had how many inhabitants? 150 million? I don't think the prospect of war against the USSR was that scary to the Japanese military leadership.)
Therefore I find the idea fairly convincing that this was the quickest way to get the Japanese military leadership to capitulate. Some go on to argue it was even the one that cost the fewest lives: the alternative would have been invasion, and that would have triggered very big famines by interrupting the railways and stuff.
Obviously, I'm not competent to judge that. I'm glad I can claim the privilege of late birth so I can muse (like comment 32), with the full benefit of hindsight, about how it was, in the abstract, good to have a nookular war as soon as possible – it worked as a deterrent and successfully prevented the Cold War from heating up (...difficult as that was, Cuban missile crisis and so on).
Was it terrorism? Fuck yes. It was meant to cause terror. :-|
Both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were third-priority targets. The potential targets that were higher up on the list were impossible to bomb that day because of... the weather.
Complete with people suffocating in the streets because the firebombs had used up all the oxygen.
"There are no devils left in hell. They are all in Rwanda."
– On the title page of Time or Newsweek (I forgot) sometime in 1994.
Wow. I had no idea.
Comments 64 and 85 are right. Dresden, like several other German cities, was carpet-bombed with the explicit intent to make the (surviving) civilians give up by... terrorizing them. (Was, BTW, a failure.) V1 and V2 had the same purpose, with added revenge ( = Vergeltung = V); they weren't anywhere near precise enough to hit only military targets or something, and that wasn't intended in the first place.
Do these numbers include the people who still die from the radiation, and will throughout the next couple of millennia?
Was done in New Mexico. There are still places with unhealthy levels of radiation there.
Who is "we"? Are you even old enough to have been on the Enola Gay or its chain of command?
Japan was not a democracy, fuckwit.
True.
Reference, please.
<headdesk>
<headdesk>
<headdesk>
<headdesk>
<headdesk>
I knew it took an awfully long time till it began to sink in how dangerous the radiation is. But I didn't know about this piece of Dunning-Kruger.
Well... yes. Of course.
Honor: the deadliest concept ever invented.
...plus a horrible, horrible translation mistake from Court Japanese to English.
Link doesn't work.
Untrue. Again: they were not on the top of the target lists.
"Deserve" and "war" are orthogonal concepts.
It's enough to keep the nukes out of their hands. Why isn't this obvious to you?
Entirely true. Already the Roman empire was put together out of fear; Caesar's conquest of Gaul out of Alexander envy was the big exception, and Caesar still sort of framed it as getting rid of a danger.
H bomb, neutron bomb, entire generations of B and C weapons... what you say has been untrue since the late 1940s.
Except that, in a dictature, it's not enough to convince the despairing people. You have to convince the military leadership.
One way to do this is to convince the despairing people so strongly that the military leadership becomes afraid of a revolution. That's much easier than in a democracy – but...
The link in comment 66 says the Japanese military leadership tried to explain the bombing of Hiroshima away as a "one-off stunt" that America wouldn't be able to repeat.
you shouldn't have left yours. It's simple.
I think you have a point... :-)
It did. WTF. The firebombing of Tokyo has been mentioned several times in this thread already!
Nagasaki showed that Hiroshima wasn't a "one-off stunt", see above.
Looks like it.
Well, yes. See the syllogism at the top of this comment.
Posted by: dckolb
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August 6, 2010 5:08 PM
@Ewan
"The Japanese military were planning on a defence which would lead to approximately 3 million civilian deaths (and all the attendant horror that this entails)
Yet they capitulated because of just shy of 200,000 deaths because the explosions were big or something?"
The Japanese Military did not want to surrender even after the second atomic bomb, as radical elements were actively attempting a palace coup in order to prevent Hirohito from addressing the nation and ordering an immediate surrender; it was Hirohito who overrode the military and ordered the surrender. It was Hirohito that decided that he could not order his people to die for what had become unquestionably a hopeless cause.
If, however, that coup had succeeded then even the second atomic bomb would not have been enough and we wouldn't be having this discussion now because the war would have dragged on for many more months, millions more people would have died and the question of whether or not the dropping of the bombs was "justified" would be relegated to a historical backwater.
Your earlier comment that tried to claim that it was all because the Russians declared war but nothing to do with the atomic bombs is laughable on its face. The Japanese were already preparing to resist what was anticipated to be a massive invasion so adding Russia into the mix would hardly be the tipping point.
That being said, the entry of Russia coupled with the now demonstrated ability to destroy entire cities or equivalent sized installations with a single airplane and bomb might be argued as a tipping point, but documentation that unequivocally supports that thesis is not available to my knowledge.
Posted by: Brian, Defender of Tone Trolls
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August 6, 2010 5:09 PM
Oh balls. I missed a perfectly interesting conversation.
Let me cut the chase. This is why we need functioning global governance. QED.
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 5:09 PM
Didn't necessarily say that the civilians had to be terrorized. Killing civilians to inspire terror in anyone was more the gist of things. Which is I believe entirely the reason for using a single large explosion rather than lots of little ones and attendant phosphorous to get the message across.
The Japanese military knew fine well that the ability to strip an area down to the ground with enormous firepower had very little bearing whatsoever on whether or not any of "us" were going to be taken out finishing off "them" so I don't really see that this would have been a particularly good message.
I still don't buy that nuclear weapons ended the war. Seems to me that the Russian declaration of war and action on this declaration played a far greater role. The Japanese had absolutely no fear of being wiped out from above - this had been occuring well before the dropping of nukes and with about the same effects. Also really ANY alternative scenario? What about the alternative scenario where no nukes are dropped, the Russians go on the offensive, and the Japanese capitulate? Somebody somewhere must have at least thought for a second that once the Russians joined in this may have at least as much of an effect as the destruction of most of a city (and arguably more, because the Japanese leadership must have known that the tactics they hoped would work against the US weren't going to work against the Russians)
Posted by: Wholly Cymbal
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August 6, 2010 5:10 PM
One thing to say to those saying the bombs were necessary: we were already closing in on the Japanese mainland by the time the bombs were dropped. The war was as good as ours. And PZ is right, dropping the bombs on entirely civilian areas was inhumanly cruel.
And the firebombings were worse! The war was fought entirely against the Japanese people, many of whom had clear opposition to the war! The Japanese attacked one of our military bases, so we slaughtered their children.
Maybe the war would have dragged on, but it wasn't as though we were on the ropes; the Japanese were. They were running suicide missions by that point (no, the Kamikaze was not, as the Banzai was, performed near the start of the conflict. It was an act of desperation). Claiming that the war would have seen no end without the bombings is pure speculation, nothing more.
And yes: terrorism. The explicit purpose was to "shock and awe" the Japanese into submission.
And please, enough of the "war is hell" nonsense. Yes, war is hell, but why must we play the part of the devil and kill hordes of children and the elderly?
Posted by: Brian, Defender of Tone Trolls
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August 6, 2010 5:11 PM
Cut to the chase. Cut TO the chase. Damn stupid fingers.
Posted by: Matt Hone
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August 6, 2010 5:12 PM
I don't think PZ does politics as well as he does science and religion.
Posted by: thomas.paul
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August 6, 2010 5:12 PM
Tell that to the survivors of the Indianapolis or the people of China or the Allied POWs.
What he thinks he knows is wrong. The US had only two bombs.
I guess you never heard of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust.
We had two bombs. What do we do when it doesn't work?
No. Firebombing cities was a tactic developed about 4,000 years ago.
And the fact is that the war was still going on. Lives were being lost every single day. The Japanese army was not all cooped up on the islands of Japan. In Indonesia, in China, in Burma, in Korea, the fighting was still going on and soldiers and civilians were dying. The Japanese submarine force was still at sea sinking and killing allied sailors. The Japanese gave us no indication that they considered surrendering. Study the Battle of Okinawa before you pretend to know what you are talking about.
Posted by: Signal
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August 6, 2010 5:20 PM
339: This is why we need functioning global governance. QED.
Never read Lord Acton then I take it?
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 5:22 PM
Still not buying it - the Allies had already demonstrated that they could wipe out the Japanese at will with firebombing. The two atom bomb drops were on pretty much the same level of destruction - given that the Japanese had knowledge of the sort of technical difficulties and expense that would go into the production of atom bombs there'd have to be some level of skepticism that there would be enough to kill off the whole Japanese population any time soon particularly if dispersed or bunkered down.
The Russians posed an entirely different problem to the Japanese - they had the same utter disregard for the lives of their own soldiers, there would be no war of attrition with the Russians from which some scraps of dignity could be bought with the blood of 3 million Japanese civilians - you give up now or you face annihilation, even if you kill 10 russians for every soldier you give up you're still screwed.
This, in my opinion, is a far bigger deterrant than the incineration of a couple of cities - as all the other Japanese cities which were incinerated stand testimony to.
Posted by: Multicellular
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August 6, 2010 5:26 PM
Let's hear from President Truman on this, shall we:
Harry S. Truman to Richard Russell, August 9, 1945
In 1945 my high school chemistry teacher, then Army infantry, sat in a ship off the coast of Japan. If the atomic bombs didn't work he, along with hundreds of thousands of other allied troops, knew they would begin the invasion of Japan. I for one am glad he was able to teach me chemistry.
You may equate the decision by Truman to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki to terrorism, but terrorists didn't rebuild Japan; the US, under Truman, did.
Posted by: https://openid.org/cujo359
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August 6, 2010 5:26 PM
There have been a lot of good rebuttals to this article already, so I'll just add this thought: war is chaos waged by fanatics and desperate people. It will never go as planned, and no rational, humane person will be happy with what happens. The only good war is the one that doesn't have to be fought.
I think that's a lesson we need to take from this, or something like this will happen again.
Posted by: Brian, Defender of Tone Trolls
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August 6, 2010 5:27 PM
Never read Lord Acton then I take it?
Sure, and if I was suggesting a centralised global monarchy your comment might have a point; but I'm more of a democracy-balanced-institutions kind of guy.
Posted by: besserwisser
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August 6, 2010 5:29 PM
Want a sense of the Japanese brutality? Research the Rape of Nanjing, Bataan Death March, Burma-Siam Death Railway etc. of course the decision was motivated by hatred of the Japanese. The problem I have is: everybody talks about Hiroshima when the fire bombings of Tokyo were far more severe. Second: everybody views it from their own hindsight bias. The best we can do is measure "why did they decide to drop the bombs?" The answer is Truman genuinely believed it would have saved more (American)lives than invasion. The reason why they didn't show a demonstration to diplomats is two reasons 1)They didn't care enough too, Truman probably lost no sleep killing 100,000 Japanese. Part of this was racism but most was war-time frustration. The Japanese were far more racist and brutal than the Americans (again research The Rape of Nanjing for an example). 2)If you potentially waste one bomb on a demonstration you only have one left. Let's not forget it took two to have the Japanese surrender. As for moral implications? Why stop at Hiroshima, how about Tokyo, Dresden, Berlin and so forth? This is when it stops being black and white. Bombing Berlin during World War II actually saved the British as it tricked Hitler into diverting bombing efforts away from the bleeding RAF and to cities, which ultimately allowed the RAF to recover and drive Hitler away from Britain. Let's try to view it from the perspectives of the people fighting the war.
To say Hiroshima was never excusable may be true but it also can allow for some serious problems. For one it runs the risk of revisionism history, where "we did it too" is employed and ultimately puts the U.S. on the same level as the Japanese or Nazis; a gross disproportion of the facts. Also, while Truman's motivations may not have been moral ones (we didn't after all go to war with Germany to end the Holocaust), it doesn't mean the war wasn't a moral one. Likewise while the destruction of a 100,000 people was horrendous, would a prolonged invasion of Japan have been any better? I honestly don't know but judging from the evidence of Japanese militarism, society, and warfare it is very likely more people would have lost their lives in the latter. I'm not excusing it, but I'm not defending it either. But I am saying it's not as simplistic as Dr. Myers is making out to be. Just my opinion. I hope you are write PZ, I would like to think such brutality is never the answer, but I'm far less certain.
Posted by: rapiertwit
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August 6, 2010 5:34 PM
I'm a longtime reader, but this article inspired me to sign up to comment for the first time. I usually agree with PZ, or at least there's a healthy overlap between his opinions and mine. But this is tripe.
First of all, I'm not sure who or what "history" is or why it should judge "us" for something that happened before we were born. A moral taint that sticks to people across generations? Sounds too much like Original Sin, to me.
Secondly, let's not lose sight of what's important. War is an awful business, the very worst behavior that humans get up to, period. But if we don't draw an ethical line between those who start the war, and those who participate in self-defense, then we've completely lost the plot.
I say, dropping an atom bomb on a city to end a war is ethically superior to helping load a ship with supplies to start one.
If you want monsters, try the Japanese elites who were willing to sacrifice their people in droves rather than accept surrender terms in which they'd lose power. If Truman had accepted a conditional surrender and left these fanatics in charge, they could have rebuilt their war machine, and we'd have another war to fight. Maybe another Rape of Nanking, that sound nice? Another generation of Japanese boys brainwashed into suicidal fanaticism? How would "history" judge Truman then?
True Story: One time when I was a kid, I happened on a kid tormenting somebody's dog that he had tied to a tree. I snuck up and damn near brained him with 5 lbs. of pre-algebra. After I freed the dog, I helped him home. I felt pretty bad because I really hurt the kid; when I left him at his house, I think his eyes were still pointing different directions. But I only felt bad about not thinking before I acted; I went too far. But I never lost sight of the fact that I went too far doing the right thing. He was doing the wrong thing. I was the good guy, he was the bad guy. I still felt sorry for him and wished I'd thought of a more peaceful way to stop him. But to this day, I can't think of a peaceful, surefire way to help that dog that wouldn't have maybe ended up with me getting my own butt kicked. And I'm still proud that I helped that dog. The point is, you can do bad things, you can make mistakes, in the course of doing the right thing. But when the bad guys are doing their thing, you have to step in, work with what you've got, and settle up with your conscience later. And yeah, I know that international conflicts don't really carve neatly up into "good guys" and "bad guys," but really... is WW2 that much of a gray area?
Posted by: Signal
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August 6, 2010 5:40 PM
rapiertwit @ #351: Post of the Day.
Posted by: Brian, Defender of Tone Trolls
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August 6, 2010 5:41 PM
And yeah, I know that international conflicts don't really carve neatly up into "good guys" and "bad guys," but really... is WW2 that much of a gray area?
It's a lot grayer than you might think. The "Allies" essentially teamed up with someone significantly worse than Hitler; an individual responsible for about 10 million deaths even before WWII had started. So yeah, those are murky waters.
Posted by: Aratina Cage
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August 6, 2010 5:50 PM
#351: smacking an animal torturer upside the head is not the same as vaporizing the whole city he lives in and making it dangerous to inhabit long afterward with a single bomb.
Posted by: btthegeek
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August 6, 2010 5:51 PM
@330 Yubal
You wrote in #291 that someone could "pretend to be handicapped" to get out of being a "soldier." Care to explain, as I already asked you to do? Or you can just take the easy way out and continue to quote me out of context.
Posted by: rapiertwit
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August 6, 2010 5:56 PM
One more thing. I'm not a blind patriot. I'm proud of some stuff about my country, ashamed of other stuff. But I think that if Hiroshima/Nagasaki is a stain on our national conscience, it's more than balanced out by our conduct after the war. The way the United States handled Japan after the war... it was a leap forward for humankind. Not a baby step, a huge leap forward in patience, forbearance, generosity and prudence exhibited on a nation-state level. We were the newly minted superpower, and we owed nothing to the Japanese people; they had attacked us and drawn us into a brutal world war. We could have colonized and plundered them and the world wouldn't have given it a second glance. Instead, as a nation we chose the path of wisdom, forgave our enemy and helped build a democracy there that still stands. I'm truly ashamed of a lot of our more recent history, but I just can't imagine how anyone thinks we come off as the jerks in the Japan vs. U.S. chapter. It's the equally irrational opposite of blind patriotism; it's like penitent self-flagellation.
Posted by: PZ Myers
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August 6, 2010 6:00 PM
Look at the link I've added to the end of the post above. If you don't want to listen to the whole thing, skip ahead to segment 23, where both Grayling and Hitchens specifically address the bombing of Hiroshima. Both think it was wrong.
Hitchens in particular addresses the claim that the purpose of the bomb was to shorten the war. It wasn't. The US knew Japan was on the edge of surrender. They kept the war going until the bombs were ready, and they avoiding bombing Hiroshima conventionally so they would have a virginal target, and they even sent B29s on regular flights over the cities with no bombing to accustom the people to their presence, so they wouldn't flee to shelter on their arrival.
It was an experiment to test the bombs on cities, and it was yet another demonstration...to Stalin.
Posted by: besserwisser
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August 6, 2010 6:01 PM
The progression of the Japanese in the eyes of the US during the war: Monkey, Superhuman, Victim, Child. I recommend John Dower's War Without Mercy for anyone interested in racism during the pacific war.
Posted by: Brian, Defender of Tone Trolls
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August 6, 2010 6:07 PM
@Rapiertwit
Agree with the bulk of your post at #356 whole heartedly.
I just can't imagine how anyone thinks we come off as the jerks in the Japan vs. U.S. chapter. It's the equally irrational opposite of blind patriotism; it's like penitent self-flagellation.
For what it's worth, I don't think PZ does think that; I suspect he would even agree with much of your last post. Nonetheless, the decision to kill hundreds of thousands of civilians in both Japan and Germany, be it by nuke or firestorm, was an act of terrorism.
Barring an outright ban on war, I'd like to so international legislation that requires military and political leaders to be held accountable for their actions, victors and losers alike.
By any reasonable measure Hitler, Stalin, Truman, Churchill, Mussolini and Hirohito were all war criminals. They should all have been tried and punished.
Posted by: msironen
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August 6, 2010 6:14 PM
"The US knew Japan was on the edge of surrender. They kept the war going until the bombs were ready, and they avoiding bombing Hiroshima conventionally so they would have a virginal target, and they even sent B29s on regular flights over the cities with no bombing to accustom the people to their presence, so they wouldn't flee to shelter on their arrival."
I'm pretty saddened to learn that Hitchens espouses such an a-historical conspiracy theory.
Posted by: besserwisser
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August 6, 2010 6:15 PM
The demonstration to Stalin argument collapses when you realize the USSR was well aware of the atomic bomb in America's possession, as well as the US knowing they knew. There is also evidence that shows the US welcomed a Soviet Invasion for a period of time, just to end the war as soon as possible. The historical evidence supports the 'preferabble to invasion' 'end the war now' answer. 'Atomic policy' as it has been called is generally regarded as revisionist history, ignoring much of the counter evidence. Doesn't mean its not true, but I find it a bit of a stretch.
Posted by: PZ Myers
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August 6, 2010 6:19 PM
That's not ahistorical. It's supported by the evidence, which Grayling cites.
The soldiers were not told that the bombing would shorten the war. That excuse was not contrived until 1947.
Of course the USSR knew of the bomb. Your argument is what collapses: if just knowing of its existence was sufficient, then why use it at all? If the knowledge of the existence of a superweapon would end the war, then a demonstration explosion should have been enough to cow Japan.
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 6:20 PM
A gross misrepresentation or maybe misunderstanding of what is meant by "total war". Total war is a situation where the civilian population is deeply involved in the war effort, as was the case in WW2 Japan.
Oh, I get it now! They were committing evil fascist imperialist total war while we were only committing good democratic total war. Ok, so both involved killing civilians and destroying property that has no involvement in the war but...well, that's where I lost the argument. The civilian population was "deeply involved" in the war effort in WWII? What about the American population that re-elected the man declared war in WWII? You might reasonably say that FDR was right to declare war-Pearl Harbor being a hard thing to just ignore-but I don't see how you could claim that US-Americans were not at least as deeply involved as Japanese. So, if Germany had got the bomb first, you'd have no problem with their nuking Washington? Or Japan nuking Seattle or LA? Both had and have military industry and one can't just ignore that because of the civilians nearby, right?
Again, you're really making a case for the 9/11 terrorists being in the right: If you believe their premise that the US is at war with Islam (not a premise that the majority of Islamic people buy, of course) then it must be ok for them to go about "total war" and attack the WTC.
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 6:23 PM
By any reasonable measure Hitler, Stalin, Truman, Churchill, Mussolini and Hirohito were all war criminals
What, no mention of FDR, one of the architects of the Dresden bombing and person who commanded the US based concentration camps?
Posted by: windy
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August 6, 2010 6:23 PM
"Couple"? This is rather too hyperbolic. Wasn't it also important that the Japanese came to believe that the US had about 100 nukes waiting?
Posted by: BrianX
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August 6, 2010 6:25 PM
One way or another, it all comes back to Operation Downfall -- if the bombs had not been dropped, would it have been necessary? Again, I don't know that there's an easy answer to that.
As for whoever said that there were only two bombs: So what? Little Boy was fairly trivial to build (a U-235 warhead is no more complicated than many of the projects in Make magazine, and a good deal less so than some), and the facts about fission explosions weren't well known (especially since Germany never really came close to a working device). The Japanese would never have known what was going on.
I would bring into consideration the German Alpine Redoubt and Werwolf -- had Hitler lived to see Nuremberg, the Redoubt would have been a hideous embarrassment, having never been quite implemented, and Werwolf was, at its very worst, an organization (and barely that) of right-wing punks spraying graffiti on walls.
PZ: A message to Stalin? Hm. Never thought of that. I can buy it -- I doubt Roosevelt, Truman, Churchill, De Gaulle, or Chiang ever really trusted him, and he is said to have played a little dirty at Yalta by insisting on speaking Russian when he was perfectly fluent in English.
Posted by: Brian, Defender of Tone Trolls
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August 6, 2010 6:26 PM
What, no mention of FDR, one of the architects of the Dresden bombing and person who commanded the US based concentration camps?
Oh you're right the list would be a long one. I was just hitting the highlights. Though Bomber Harris was a near unforgivable oversight.
*chastened*
Posted by: baldywilson
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August 6, 2010 6:28 PM
Well, you know what. You're wrong.
History does not judge individual Americans for what happened before they were born, any more than history judges individual British people for what our empire did before I was born, or what the German government did during WWII before the current generation of Germans was born. History does, however, judge the British Empire. It judges the Third Reich, and by bloody hell, it judges the American military bastards that dropped The Bomb on two cities. And it continues to judge Americans, because there remains a section of the American populace that believes that dropping nuclear bombs on two cities was justified. Incidentally, history also judges America for it's history of genocide towards the native Americans. History seems to judge America most harshly because so many Americans don't give a damn.
Bollocks.
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 6:29 PM
he is said to have played a little dirty at Yalta by insisting on speaking Russian when he was perfectly fluent in English.
How is that playing dirty? If I were negotiating an international treaty with a dangerous ally (say, for example, one that had just demonstrated a weapon that could destroy an entire city) which had in the past expressed hostility towards me, my country, and/or my politics, I'd want to do it in my first language with professional translators verifying every detail however fluent I was in said ally's language. It'd be a very bad time to start a war and starting one over a misunderstood idiom would be even worse.
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 6:36 PM
@368: My personal take on personal and collective responsibility for past massacres, genocides, and sundry crimes: I don't judge modern day US-Americans for the dropping of the atomic bomb. I do judge them and think much the worse of them for the fact that, as amply displayed here, modern US-Americans are PROUD of their ancestors for using the atomic bomb. That is what makes me ashamed of my country*, not the acts of our ancestors.
*Well, that and the two aggressive wars...and the lack of health care for the poorest of our citizens...and the fundamentalist strain...and...eh, enough. I'll list the things I'm proud of another day.
Posted by: Tim Harris
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August 6, 2010 6:39 PM
I live in Japan, and am not going to get into arguing the rights and wrongs, though I think, with Grayling and Robert Lowell, that bombing civilians is an evil act, but I just want to say that it is men who judge, and not some reified abstraction called 'History', and the better we realise that, the more we can take genuine respomsibility. Appealing to 'History' is - sorry, PZ - a moral cop-out.
Posted by: Utakata
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August 6, 2010 6:40 PM
...I also kinda wonder if these armchair patriots and nuke'em apologists where standing anywhere near those bombs dropped I doubt very much they will be sounding in such wanting unison that PZ or anyone else is wrong in thinking this was a crime against humanity.
...as for whether my position would change, if I where to witness the Japanese Army raping and pillaging vilages, bayoneting babies, biting heads off of kittens and what not; it will likely not. Since as I do now think those are horrible atrocities. But it doesn't give us the right to commit those same and/or different atrocities to them. So their arguement is really one of revenge not deterrence. /shrug
Posted by: Wholly Cymbal
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August 6, 2010 6:43 PM
That's exactly the same as saying "well they started it!" What makes you think that, by denouncing the atomic bombings of Japan by the US one must also praise the Japanese for what they did in Nanking? That's stupid enough, but considering that a significant portion of the people killed by the firebombings and atomic bombings of Japan were noncombatants, meaning a lot of them were children. Fair enough. The problem is personal, then: I think Truman made the more despicable choice. I never think it's a good thing to send troops into a death zone, and I am against war in principle (but I won't run away from its ugly truths). The fact is, Truman and his administration chose the lives of adults who are heavily armed and trained to be in war over the lives of innocent children who didn't even know what the hell was happening.I'm no more than a hobbyist historian, though. If a WWII historian were to tell me that I was wrong, fine. They'd just have to tell me why, and if they say "it needed to be done to end the war" or any variation thereof, all I can say is "how do you know that?" I get it, they made a time critical choice that they thought was best. I just think it was a monstrous choice and I don't blame P.Z. for calling a spade a spade.
Posted by: SteveM
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August 6, 2010 6:45 PM
Whatever the military value the bombing had in ending WWII, I think its true value was in its effect on how we view "The Bomb". I don't think any demonstrations in the desert or on islands would truly imprint the horror of those weapons the way the victims of Hirshima and Nagasaki did on the consciousness of all mankind. I think it was Hiroshima and Nagasaki that caused Kruschev to "blink" that day in October '62 and prevented a much larger horror from occurring. The death toll from war has dropped dramatically since Aug 6 1945, I don't think that would be the case if we hadn't used those weapons. I hate "the ends justify the means" arguments as much as anyone and I am not trying to justify Hiroshima this way, but maybe it was necessary to show us where the line of "now you've gone too far" is. So that we can really mean it when we say "never again".
Posted by: Tim Harris
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August 6, 2010 6:48 PM
Another question that might be raised, given the common assumption that science is an unmitigated good, is what is the moral responsibility of those many scientists who worked on projects that they knew were going to result in mass killings.
Posted by: Alan(UK)
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August 6, 2010 6:52 PM
Wars seem to start with good intentions - conforming to the Geneva Convention if not the Queensbury Rules. Then comes the realisation that winning is what matters not how you play the game.
Wars seem to end in genocide. The winner will write the future rules of warfare so nobody cares about obeying the current ones.
WWII had reached that point. The old idea that soldiers went to the battlefield while civilians stayed at home knitting balaclavas had long since gone. A soldier was just a conscripted civilian and a civilian was a munitions worker.
The 1000 bomber raid aimed at killing civilians was already well established. Werner von Braun had engaged in using weapons of mass destruction (to use a modern idiom) even planning one to reach New York.
The decision to use nuclear weapons has to be considered in the context of the attitudes prevailing at the time. It is easy to see that the one wish was to end the war and end it on the winning side.
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 6:54 PM
The death toll from war has dropped dramatically since Aug 6 1945,
Tell it to the Vietnamese. And Cambodians, Koreans, Nicaraguans, Afghani, etc. The US hasn't fought against the country it really wants to destroy directly since WWII but it has fought quite as nastily in proxy wars.
It's also not clear to me that the lack of use of nukes is anything more than good luck. Kennedy didn't blink in 1962 and if Kruschev hadn't happened to be reasonable things might have gone otherwise. Maybe Oswald saved us from a nuclear war by killing Kennedy when he did. Nixon also came quite close to using nukes in Viet Nam. Not sure what stopped him: he apparently claimed it was the protestors.
Posted by: Yubal
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August 6, 2010 7:06 PM
btthegeek,
If they come to make you a soldier, play dumb and imitate the The Hunchback of Notre-Dame as close as possible. They will not want you to be "their" soldier. Alternatively, if you are not good at acting, shoot in your foot, cut-off your right index finger or else. They won't have a use for you in the army anymore.
Sounds a little drastic, I know, but if it is the only way to keep you out of the mess of conscription, you're better off doing it.
btw:
I considered that to be an insult, not a question:
Posted by: Sioux Laris
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August 6, 2010 7:08 PM
One the one hand I am saddened to see an absolutely unremarkable debate, with (probably) a slim majority of comments so far finding "reasons" that these bombings were the "right" thing to do - or "unavoidable" - or "natural".
I know that, here perhaps every person actually means well. Or at least means something.
And you knw who they sound like to me? Apologists for the Confederacy for one. The crowd that wanted to excuse South Africa's apartaid in the 80s for another.
They REALLY feel a deep sense of its wrongness. They, somehow, feel deeply responsible - as much as I do. They are ashamed of themselves and their people and their government.
But their pride still, weirdly, is more important to them than anything else.
Even here!
Posted by: Gordy
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August 6, 2010 7:09 PM
PZ wrote:
That's where the evidence leads us, and yet so many on here are still making excuses for it. Why can't you accept that your country did something wrong? I live in Japan and I can assure you that the people here are as human as you and I. Yes, the Japanese military committed some appalling acts during the second world war, but that does not justify testing nuclear weapons on the civilian population. If you think it does, you have no right to call anyone else subhuman...
Posted by: simonator
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August 6, 2010 7:17 PM
One can argue the counterfactuals forever, in fact, people will. But the fact is, the people making the decisions had NO IDEA what it would take to get the Japanese to surrender on terms that the Allies found acceptable. And rightly or wrongly, after Natzi's rose to power, there was a fairly common perception that "unconditional surrender" was what would be required to prevent us from having to do the same thing all over again in thirty years. Nobody knew that two would be the magic number of bombs that would get the japanese to surrender. Since one didn't do it, there was no particular reason to believe that seven would. As it turns out, despite the die-hard militarists who wanted to go down dying in a blaze of glory, the Japanese WERE close to surrender. But of course none of the Allies had any way of knowing that.
From a destructive point of view, the bombs actually caused LESS damage than the firebombing that we were already engaged in. It just saved on AvGas. But systematicly attempting to set fire to every square mile of urban area in Japan (a project that was something like 30% completed) had NOT yet persuaded Japan to surrender.
Several people have said that "we only had two bombs," and while this is marginally true, every part of the 4th bomb except for the pit was already on Tinian by the end of the war, and the pit had already been shipped to the West coast. So the next bombing was no more than two weeks away. Estimates are that we could have turned out between two and four per month for the forseeable future. It's an open question whether the Japanese would have agreed to surrender had they realized the paltry rate at which we could crank out atomic bombs. At that rate it possible that we would have continued killing more people with convtional firebombings than with the nukes.
The question was whether to keep bombing cities or to save them up for the invasion. Invasion wasn't considered an "alternative" to dropping the bomb. Rather, once the bomb's existance was revealed, the question became how to best use it to make invasion easier. Certainly everybody HOPED that the Japanese would surrender, the sooner, the better for all concerned. But people were PLANNING for continued implaccable and fanatical resistance of the kind that had been seen so far.
And make no mistake invasion was NOT going to be some sort of surgical attack where civilians were going to magicly be cleared out of the way so that soldiers could fight it out between each other. A look at the destruction of Stalingrad, Berlin, or Manila gives one a good look at what having modern armies fight over a city results in: death and destruction in an unprecedented scale.
The alternative to invasion, continued aerial destruction and blockade had already been discarded as taking too long. The fact that it would have probably have resulted in the starvation deaths of millions wasn't really a consideration. Really, nobody seriously considered NOT using the atom bomb. Rather most were shocked that two of the DID seem to be sufficient to persuade the Japanese to surrender.
All of this is not to argue that dropping the bomb was moral per se. Merely that it wasn't actually worse than any other action being considered with the exception of a negotiated surrender short of unconditional surrender. And the fact the Germans had started the second world war a mere 21 years after losing the first meant that there was NO interest in that option.
Posted by: Sioux Laris
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August 6, 2010 7:23 PM
Oh, and I am VERY sorry and rather surprised, on a second scroll through this long "debate", that there are so many callous Monday-morning chickenhawks - people who have "great reasons" for having atrocities committed (by others) in their name so long as they have reaped the "benefits."
To these self-dehumanized not-even-shits: may you grow a conscience that actually works properly. Or, more simply put into common, figurative, slang: fuck off & die.
Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/ZtcYREgkweeGsULreuYqtWysjg_Gwy5n1A--#27f9d
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August 6, 2010 7:29 PM
Sioux Laris, you seem to have missed the irony, in a discussion about World War II of all places, of calling your opponents subhuman and telling them to "fuck off & die."
Posted by: Joffan
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August 6, 2010 7:32 PM
It seems to be a key point to understand that Japan was in no way "on the edge of surrender". They were prepared and equipped to fight an invasion of their home islands. Their military was determined to keep fighting and nearly managed to carry the vote to continue the war after the second A-bomb. This is well-documented.
As for claim that the Americans were keeping the war going so they could drop A-bombs - that is shameful, unmitigated, conspiracy-theory bollocks.
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 7:37 PM
But of course none of the Allies had any way of knowing that.
The Allies had cracked the Japanese military's codes much earlier in the war. They knew perfectly well what the Japanese military was considering and what they weren't. They may have misjudged some things, for example how much influence the extremists had versus the moderates, but they certainly had a way of knowing at the very least that surrender was being considered by some factions.
Posted by: Wholly Cymbal
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August 6, 2010 7:41 PM
Of course they were. They weren't just going to roll over and let American troops waltz in. But they were still losing. They were losing China, already lost what they had in Indonesia, and they were feeling the pressure from Russia, too. They'd become so desperate they were flying planes into ships. Even the Banzai was ideally meant to leave the attacker still standing.
No one is saying that Japan wasn't ready to fight. We're saying they were losing the fight already.
Posted by: Kyorosuke
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August 6, 2010 7:42 PM
I can't bring myself to read this debate. These bombings were among the absolute worst things humanity has ever done, and there is no excuse for it. What America did was evil. I don't care that "we won". Victory is not worth innocent children being vaporized. It is not worth their parent's skin being blackened to a crisp as their shadows are burnt into the wall behind them. Victory is not worth poisoned black rain falling from the sky, and leaving even more dead innocents in it's wake.
Nothing is worth that.
I highly recommend visiting the Hiroshima Peace Museum, and if you can't, reading the Japanese graphic novel Barefoot Gen, written by a survivor of the first bombing. If you read it thoroughly, you will never, ever again think that nuclear weapons are in any way "necessary".
Posted by: Gordy
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August 6, 2010 7:44 PM
Joffan:
Reference? Christopher Hitchens, A.C. Grayling, P.Z. Myers and many others, including myself, would disagree with you.Posted by: KG
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August 6, 2010 7:45 PM
- SteveVWhat you think is of little interest unless you supply us with some reason to agree with you. There are many other possible causes for the declining death toll - the UN and other international bodies; the fact that while the state interests of the USA and USSR were certainly conflicting, it was not vital for the elite of either state to destroy or conquer the other; growth in international trade and travel; the fact that modern warfare is just very, very expensive... Even without nukes, a "hot" war between the USA and USSR would have been immensely destructive to both - and both sides would have known this - "mutual deterrence" would have existed anyway.
simonatorSimply false. The Russians passed on the fact that the Japanese leaders were trying to get them to intercede. (Incidentally, I made an error in an earlier post. The Soviet-Japanese neutrality treaty expired on 13th April 1945 - it was not denounced on the day the USSR declared war on Japan, 8th August, as I said.) The US was also reading Japanese codes on a regular basis and so knew a great deal about the desperate state of its military. Moreover, it knew Japan had lost all access to the oil supplies of South-East Asia and simply could not continue to function as an industrial power for more than a few months.
It is absolutely certain that the decision to drop the bombs was influenced by the desire to demonstrate the power of the weapons to the whole world, and specifically to give the US leverage against the Soviet Union. This is well-documented by Gar Alperovitz Atomic Diplomacy, Hiroshima and Potsdam: The Use of the Atomic Bomb and the American Confrontation with Soviet Power (I have the second edition, 1985). However, while he says the dropping of the bombs was not necessary to end the war (and cites a post-war official US Strategic Bombing Survey stating that Japan would soon have surrendered with the nukes, the Soviet declaration of war, or any invasion), he does not deny that ending the war quickly and on terms that could be publicly presented as unconditional was one motive. The different motives were not seen as competing, but as all reinforcing the decision. Of course, there may well have been further research since then that I'm unaware of.
Alperovitz also notes that conventional bombing continued after it was known the Japanese would surrender with only an implicit concession on the status of the Emperor.
Finally, he has an interesting epigraph - interesting for its source:
"It wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing" - General Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Posted by: PZ Myers
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August 6, 2010 7:47 PM
Of course Japan was ready to fight! But could they? They are an island nation, their navy was at the bottom of the sea, their supplies were choked off, and they had no hope of relief. Their capacity for ferocity and bravery is not understated, but going against a modern well-supplied army with swords and sticks and half-starved soldiers is not a formula for victory.
Posted by: Sioux Laris
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August 6, 2010 7:49 PM
Hey! Post #383 without a quotable name!
You have the reading skills of a homeskooled kneeocon. I won't bother to analyze your other faults - most others here are not idiots.
Posted by: KG
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August 6, 2010 7:50 PM
Tsk. Obviously that should be: "without the nukes, the Soviet declaration of war, or any invasion".
Posted by: feralboy12
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August 6, 2010 7:58 PM
With all the arguments here, I haven't seen anyone dispute the following:
The U.S. leaders knew Hiroshima and Nagasaki contained hundreds of thousands of civilians who had no voice in whether or not to wage war.
The U.S. and its allies were in a position of superiority, Germany and Italy being defeated and Japan no longer having access to the materials needed to continue the war.
The U.S. leaders, having tested the weapon, had a good idea of the impact it would have on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And they dropped it anyway.
I can't justify this morally. And I'm speaking as one of those Americans who might not be here if an invasion had been necessary.
The rationalizations?
It saved lives. But you can use that argument to justify any atrocity that causes your enemy to give up. That which excuses everything excuses nothing.
The Japanese were brutal. Yes. But if brutality is wrong, it's wrong for everyone. Including the good guys.
They refused to give up. Yeah. But demanding unconditional surrender, and showing ourselves willing to firebomb whole cities indiscriminately, we put the ending of the war in terms no society could accept. Given a choice of submit to destruction of your society and die defending it, we would make the same choice.
We were morally justified in going to war; I'm glad we won. I'm glad my father didn't have to invade Japan. I'm proud of the way we treated our vanquished enemies. I know war produces atrocities, and I won't demonize the people who made the harsh decisions under the circumstances that existed then.
But arguing that the bombings were justified because it was war and they started it and didn't quit? That's a generic defense that I would like my country to be above. America has a track record of refusing to face the truth of the bombings. It is evident in the statements of Truman, who over time inflated the hypothetical number of lives saved several times. It was evident in the 90's when the idea of putting actual photos of damage done in the Enola Gay display was unacceptable to many. It's evident here, on this thread.
If you throw moral principle out the window when you go to war, what is your justification for fighting?
Posted by: https://me.yahoo.com/a/ZtcYREgkweeGsULreuYqtWysjg_Gwy5n1A--#27f9d
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August 6, 2010 7:58 PM
Sioux Laris, I will happily bother to analyze your own faults, should they ever develop beyond aggressive posturing and feverish name-calling. If you cannot detect the ironies in your style of argument, your reading skills are even worse than mine.
Posted by: Multicellular
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August 6, 2010 8:03 PM
Wholly Cymbal said:
War is an abomination which is why it should be avoided and detered. Truman didn't want the death of women and children (see my comment above) but he did want to end the war as quickly as possible to avoid any further loss of life. Because Truman answered to the American people the lives he sought to protect most were those of our troops.
Children aren't the targets in war, they are too often the unfortunate victims of national policy - in this case Japan's.
Posted by: t.bo
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August 6, 2010 8:15 PM
Have to disagree with you on this one. War isn't nice. In two bombings alone of Germany (Dresden and Hamburg) it's estimated that 65,000-75,000 lives were lost. Not to mention, the Japanese did not surrender after the first bomb.
Posted by: dckolb
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August 6, 2010 8:26 PM
@PZ
"Of course Japan was ready to fight! But could they? They are an island nation, their navy was at the bottom of the sea, their supplies were choked off, and they had no hope of relief. Their capacity for ferocity and bravery is not understated, but going against a modern well-supplied army with swords and sticks and half-starved soldiers is not a formula for victory."
One more time, PZ. The Japanese Military were not stupid; fanatical yes, but not stupid. They knew that "Victory" defined as repelling the invasion was not possible, but what they were angling for was to make the expected invasion so costly that the allies would eventually accept a negotiated peace that left the Japanese military firmly in power. Towards that end, they had stockpiled supplies, ammunition, fuel and hardware and they would have thrown civilians and anyone else available to the allied invasion force; the resulting carnage would have been horrific.
I watched the video (at least ch-23)and yes Hitchens and Grayling make the claims that Japan wanted to surrender, etc. but they simply assert them as fact and offer no justification for this. From what I've read, yes there were some individuals making overtures but none of them were acting with any authority from the Japanese High Command and without the assurance that the negotiators were acting with the tacit approval of the high command (you know the same folks that almost didn't surrender even after two atomic bombs)negotiations were not likely to bear fruit.
Posted by: Ewan R
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August 6, 2010 9:05 PM
Ok - too lazy to blockquote, I'm assuming the interested parties will know who they are -
On whether or not anyone knew, or suspected what would cause the Japanese to surrender - let's requote the Truman letter which was stuck in a post which apparently was completely contradictory to what I've been trying to get across
My emphasis.
What happened? The Russians entered the war. The Japanese shortly folded up.
Nobody could have predicted this right?
Well other than fucking Harry Truman.
Once the Russians entered the war all hope of retaining anything by bloodying America's nose went away. You can gut the Russian bear and it's not going to give a damned inch. They had just proven this by beating Germany bloody with their own torn off limbs.
The nukes didn't save your high school chem teacher, or your grandfather, or anyone at all in a concentration camp. The real threat of absolute destruction posed by the Russians did.
Posted by: Cerberus, unnatural product of en-OMnomnom-ification
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August 6, 2010 9:21 PM
My grandfather fought in the Pacific Theater, deeply involved in the Sisyphean Island Hopping campaign. When many talk of the "lives saved" by ending the war with the dropping of the nuclear warheads on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, my grandfather was probably one of those saved by the shortening of the War in the Pacific Theater. He had my mother after that war and might have never conceived her if he had died or rendered broken by the continued horrors of war.
So, that imaginary existential crisis is one that affects me personally.
Thing is, though, that doesn't actually excuse anything. Nuking cities of civilians or even the carpet-bombing of civilian populations in order to break the will of a country to fight is one of the gravest inhumanities of war and was only left of the drafting of the War Crimes articles because of US and Allied culpability in committing those atrocities.
The nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were atrocities, end of the war be damned.
However, we can't handle that, because we in the US are mental children.
World War II was the "Last Good War". We were "on the right side", we fought a terrible evil in Hitler, we rose to a formal superpower, one of two superpowers remaining in the world and began a campaign of global dominance that allowed us to dabble in the unfortunately quintessential "empire" phase in our country.
We also haven't had a war we can justify like World War II since then despite having a more powerful military machine than pretty much the entire world combined. Korea? Let's not kid ourselves. Vietnam? Practically a slur now. The various skirmishes of the 80s? Like a bully beating up on the developmentally-challenged kid. Iraq, Afghanistan, Iraq again? Will become a slur probably the moment we leave.
Many wars either with unsatisfactory non-Hollywood-friendly ends or elements that made it clear that we might actually be on the wrong side to start with or turning into a global bully.
World War II became this giant symbol for especially the pro-war community. It seemed so perfectly heroic that we couldn't resist shaving off and making taboo the mentioning of our hideous monstrous elements.
The fact that we waited years to enter the conflict until the moment it looked like Russia might actually win the war single-handedly and we started the campaign in Africa and the Pacific Seas, only fighting Hitler at the beginning of the end of Germany's reign? Erased.
Dresden bombing? A quirk only noted if Slaughterhouse 5 was read in English class this year.
Japanese internment? Will a belated apology and a whitewash of how extensive it was count?
And Hiroshima, Nagasaki?
Man oh man, this was the hard one to erase. Bombing whole cities in firebombing, Japanese internment, late entries into the war, the turning away of Jewish refugees? Those could be mitigated and downplayed.
But the only case of nuclear weapons actually being used on populated areas?
And twice in short succession?
That couldn't be buried.
But it could be "justified". Not in reality, but certainly in the stories we tell ourselves until we believe them. We had to win damnitt, Japanese honour would have never allowed surrender, we were avenging Pearl Harbor, American servicemen would have died, the Japanese were monsters too, you know.
Anything and everything we grab as justification to keep alive the lie that World War II was the good war where we fought cartoonishly evil villains while remaining in every sense the "good guys" in the conflict. And maybe if we hadn't nuked two Japanese cities traumatizing a nation for generations and leaving them with long-lasting health problems and contamination, we could have supported that more easily, at least as anti-heroes.
But with that, we gave up any pretense of moral high ground.
If we were a population capable of shame, we would accept that we lost even the rights to call it the "Last Good War".
But we aren't. As such we'll fight to the death anyone who dares tell us the truth about ourselves in order to prolong the lie and minimizing like ghouls the hideous deaths and deformities of the entire populations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, two major cities (like New York and Chicago) rather than dare accept the truth.
We'll make up anything, come up with any rationalization to make it "necessary" and "good".
My grandpa is one of the ones who might have been "saved" by your arguments. You dishonor his service and his life by these arguments. Existential anxiety be damned.
Posted by: shaxanth27
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August 6, 2010 9:32 PM
I consider it to have been the U.S's first act as Bully of the World. A role it's only grown more into in the 65 years since.
Posted by: Cerberus, unnatural product of en-OMnomnom-ification
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August 6, 2010 9:34 PM
Also worth noting?
Our failure to learn any form of moral lesson from Hiroshima and Nagasaki has led to future atrocities.
We should have learned a valuable lesson from those bombings. The high cost of "victory", the humanity of our enemies, and how desires for revenge against an enemy that "dared attack us", should have all been things that could be used to calm us down in times of anger, say when we have been attacked again by an amorphous enemy.
But nope, Hiroshima/Nagasaki was necessary and good, so when a cell of islamic terrorists attacked us on 9/11 we responded with, over-reactions, violent "we'll give them Hell ten times over" and atrocity after atrocity where we lost all moral compass. We turned to torturing perceived enemy soldiers and civilians, carpet bombing cities, slaughtering civilians and even trying to destroy whole cities (like Fallujah) with radioactive weaponry and near-nuke sized "Bunker Buster" bombs.
We learned nothing, but found great justifications for those atrocities as well. We needed to win, damnitt, they attacked us, we needed to teach them a lesson, they're monsters, this is the only way to stop the war or stop their attacks, etc...
Same moral destruction, but this time in an era of unprecedented attention and much harder to hide the bodies as WikiLeaks has proved. Much worse, we couldn't point to some great deed like stopping Hitler to justify these actions. "Stopping Saddam Hussein" doesn't really have the same "world in balance" ring to it.
And frankly, we'll probably fail to learn the lesson again because that's what we do. We're a young country, and we react like children when our bloody deeds are shown to us in all their horror. It's not our fault, we were justified, we were just reacting to them, mooom.
We must either come to terms with the ignobility of many of our past deeds or we will be doomed to repeat them, perpetually learning nothing but how to get away with them next time.
Posted by: Wholly Cymbal
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August 6, 2010 9:37 PM
And that was a fool's bet. They were screwed, for all the reasons I listed in the last comment and more. It doesn't matter how badly they wanted it, victory was not in their grasp. I and several others have addressed this. So did P.Z.Posted by: DLC
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August 6, 2010 9:45 PM
Too bad there's no historians around.
Posted by: Kyorosuke
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August 6, 2010 9:45 PM
Cerberus @401/399:
Thank you. You expressed that far more eloquently than I could, in my impotent rage over some in this thread's inability to recognize just how horrible this was.
There will never be an excuse for it, and history cannot be changed. But we can make sure it never happens again.
And every one of you apologizing for and justifying it are making that less likely. Those who do not learn from the mistakes of history are doomed to repeat them.
Posted by: Crazy Cat Lady
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August 6, 2010 9:48 PM
Sorry PZ I usually agree with 99% you have to say but now you are mistaken.
You can't look at history though 21 st Century prism.
The during world war II two the Japanese where totally militaristic culture. The American military predicted that one million American causalities if they invaded the Japan. Now considering they fought like hell over those shitty islands its not entirely improbable. Truman agonized and regretted this decision for the rest of this life. But would Truman explain to a million American mothers that there sons could have been saved. Fuck the soviets. It may have been in the back of a couple of American military minds but it was not impetus the main thrust of
The Japanese stated that if the Americans invaded they would kill all the American POW s that were currently in there camps and considering the Bataan death march the Military were taking that threat seriously. The Japanese military also threated to arm the populace of Japan.
Plus,even after the first bomb was dropped the Japanese did not surrendered in fact they kept the news from the emperor. It wasn't until Nagasaki that the Emperor found out that he surrendered over the radio. Which is considerable since he was consider a god by the Japanese people. There was an attempted coup by the Japanese military which was unsuccessful.
We know that this was a regrettable decision however it over now and we should not judge history too harshly. But it happened, we should make sure ti never happens again.
Posted by: PZ Myers
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August 6, 2010 9:56 PM
Yes, Japanese culture was militaristic.
Now put your 21st century goggles back on, and look at the US. Who is fighting wars of aggression in this century? Who advocates torture and prison without recourse to the courts?
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 10:00 PM
I consider it to have been the U.S's first act as Bully of the World. A role it's only grown more into in the 65 years since.
Nah, the US had already started playing the bully long before that. Check out manifest destiny and the Monroe doctrine for example. Maybe this was the first time the US could play the WORLD bully though.
Posted by: Ing: PhD Trollologist
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August 6, 2010 10:06 PM
"The during world war II two the Japanese where totally militaristic culture. "
Really? Totally militaristic? Even Zen monks and children?
Orcs are totally militaristic.
I might also point out to many who rightfully bring up Japanese war crimes; the reason why that's not widely known is because the US helped sweep it under the rug. We specifically traded protection/retribution for 731 in exchange for their data.
Posted by: shaxanth27
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August 6, 2010 10:18 PM
Dianne #407:
Point taken, sadly.
Posted by: broboxley OT
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August 6, 2010 10:19 PM
@PZ #406 what does that have to do with the price of coffee?
Todays wars are not attributable to dropping the atomic bomb. If you feel that particular act of nuclearicide in Japan explains todays stupidity you need to provide some proof in the way of progressive timelines with historical documents that can prove a straight line between Hiroshima and Lashkar. Or you could extend a sample of what you are smoking and I will test it objectively for quality.
Posted by: https://openid.org/cujo359
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August 6, 2010 10:23 PM
PZ Myers @ 390
They could on Okinawa. It took months to conquer a relatively small island (pop. 300k or so at the time, plus 100k Japanese soldiers), and cost the Allies 12k dead. They had very little more to draw on than Japanese on the mainland would have. By the end of it 100k Japanese civilians and essentially all of the soldiers were dead.
We're discussing an outcome that didn't happen, but I see no reason to believe why millions of Japanese wouldn't have died in an invasion of the main islands.
Posted by: Cerberus, unnatural product of en-OMnomnom-ification
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August 6, 2010 10:28 PM
broboxley @410
The point, was in fact, to point out that the excuse "japanese were a militaristic society" was a mealy-mouthed desperate excuse from an American desperate to save an image of World War II as the good war where we did no wrong.
He was showing that by that Dunning-Kruger-esque "logic" one could very easily justify atrocities against well, us, seeing as how we are very militaristic, extremely aggressive, and certainly brutal in our tactics.
As a justification it is obviously self-serving twaddle because the person he was speaking to would in no way believe, being an American, that our actions of "militarism" and being "militaristic" and being impossible to move to a surrender or withdraw would in any way justify a nuking of two of our major cities.
Unless you and Crazy Cat Lady are willing to put your "I'm so much more skeptical than thou" money where your mouths are and accept that our "enemies" would be fully justified in nuking New York and Chicago, you might want to rethink your defense of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, at least on those inane grounds.
Also, you might want to brush up on reading comprehension, because your agitated state has made you suck at it.
I get no country and its citizens ever wants to admit when it has done wrong, especially in something so iconic as the pinnacle of "heroism" such as World War II.
But self-serving rewrites and justifications, and the blind eye we turn to atrocities just ensures their continuous recurrence against various groups again and again.
To break the cycle, we must learn from past mistakes and accept that we have wronged where we have. Learning from the past to make a better future is the mark of a great nation.
We can be a great nation.
If we didn't stop believing that that meant we have to erase and minimize the shame of our worst actions with mealy-mouthed justifications and minimizations.
Posted by: Insightful Ape
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August 6, 2010 11:22 PM
OK just one question.
If the japanese were ready to surrender, then why didn't they surrender after Hiroshima? Why did it come to the second one? Or is it that even Hiroshima wasn't enough to bring them to their senses?
The same thing can be said for the second objection of why was it not dropped into the sea right off Japan. If Hiroshima wasn't enough to convince them, then just a display would?
OK, two.
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 11:24 PM
Todays wars are not attributable to dropping the atomic bomb. If you feel that particular act of nuclearicide in Japan explains todays stupidity you need to provide some proof in the way of progressive timelines with historical documents that can prove a straight line between Hiroshima and Lashkar.
Perhaps not a straight line, but more of a twisted corkscrew sort of line...After WWII came the Cold War. Except for the very beginning of the Cold War, both major powers had nukes. So fighting each other directly was out. Instead, the US and USSR fought each other through proxy wars, such as Viet Nam.
The US also had a policy of supporting opponents of the USSR. For example, after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the US supported rebel groups such as the Mujahadeen (however it's really spelled). This is also generally acknowledged. More speculative is the claim that the US intentionally cultivated the most radical of the Afghani rebels on the grounds that they were more predictable or controllable. Much like the US prefers dictators to democracy in its client states, ie various Central American countries. Be that as it may, the Soviets retreated, eventually, from the Graveyard of Empires, leaving a power vacuum. One group that moved into that power vacuum was the Taliban, many members of which were trained originally as anti-Soviet "freedom fighters" by the US or its ally Pakistan. Then came the little incident of 9/11/01.
Thus, the connection between the destruction of Hiroshima and Lashkar.
Posted by: broboxley OT
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August 6, 2010 11:25 PM
@Cerberus, product of en-OMnomnom-ification #412
from those 2 sentences you attribute a whole religion of attribution to those from original sin to forgiveness. So PZ is the singularity and you are the acolyte explaining how woo in small words for the majik unwashed works.thats how religions get started one person PZ in this case
Perhaps a review of my posts at #70, 104, 194,204, 223, 236 might give you an idea that I am not an apologist
Now as to the thrust of your post
as to fully justifying the nuking of NYC and Chicago lets ask the average Pahktun. He might feel that it is a good idea as they have a view of vengeance similar to our own. As to trying to pretend they dont have the "smarts" to build such a device, a visit to the arms bazaar in Peshawar might be in order. Certainly they have had a boatload of American grief forced down their throats.
Now have a wild guess on who first used poison gas to attack on Iraqis. If you said Winston Churchill you would be correct.
Justifiable to Nuke those two cities? It certainly matches our pattern of behavior towards our fellow citizens so why the surprise that we did it to strangers?
Posted by: broboxley OT
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August 6, 2010 11:30 PM
Diane #414
Thus, the connection between the destruction of Hiroshima and Lashkar.
certainly it relieves the cities of NYC washington DC and Moscow, ArcAngel from being radioactive lakes of slime does it not? Would you be willing to trade the world trade center for 100 miles of desolation that would last for 38k years? I would
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 11:31 PM
If the japanese were ready to surrender, then why didn't they surrender after Hiroshima? Why did it come to the second one?
How about because the second one was dropped less than 3 days later and few governments can get their crap together to do ANYTHING in 3 days. Remember, the government officials had to hear about the bombing, get to the bombing to see if rumors were true (in a country with severely disrupted transportation), evaluate the situation, and come to a decision. I've read that the Nagasaki bombing actually took place while officials were touring Hiroshima and coming to the conclusion that they must strongly urge surrender. In short, it probably took the second one because the US military wanted to use the second bomb and made sure that the Japanese had no chance to surrender beforeit got to do so.
Posted by: SteveM
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August 6, 2010 11:40 PM
re 389:
What you think is of little interest unless you supply us with some reason to agree with you.
Well excuse me for expressing an opinion. I thought that was acceptable here. And thanks for misspelling my name.
Posted by: Dianne
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August 6, 2010 11:40 PM
certainly it relieves the cities of NYC washington DC and Moscow, ArcAngel from being radioactive lakes of slime does it not?
Certainly. But perhaps the Vietnamese and Afghani would be happier if the US and USSR kept their war to themselves instead of spilling it out over the whole world. At this point, the US has so many nuclear weapons that it is essentially holding the entire world hostage. But if the US and USSR had had their nuclear war in the 1950s when it would have been if not survivable for those two countries, at least not completely destructive to the biosphere, it might have been better for all concerned. Certainly the Cambodian genocide wouldn't have happened, nor would the Indonesian and a few dozen dirty little wars in Latin America and Africa might never have occurred. I won't dare suggest that a non-violent method of settling the differences between the US and USSR would have been preferable because I don't see the US, certainly not the US of the 1950s, as being willing to compromise enough to allow an entirely peaceful settlement. As for the Soviet Union...even less so.
Posted by: broboxley OT
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August 6, 2010 11:40 PM
Dianne #417 not eve one zero with a senior airman to fly up and back in a few hours? hardly.
Posted by: broboxley OT
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August 7, 2010 12:03 AM
Dianne #419 full agreement there but genocides would have happened in cambodia and indonesia. Even the latest one against the tamils would have happended anyway. Super powers have nery little control over religious wars whether secular or non secular its a class struggle extended to extremism
Posted by: geralcorasjo
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August 7, 2010 12:26 AM
Jesus would have dropped the bombs.
Posted by: Cerberus, unnatural product of en-OMnomnom-ification
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August 7, 2010 12:30 AM
broboxley @415
Wow, that might just be the dumbest, least informed, completely insane response I've gotten this week and I've had a pretty terrible week.
Are you usually "Pharyngulites treat PZ as a God" crazy or is this a one-subject-matter treat?
Against my better judgment, I must admit to being genuinely curious about your answer.
Posted by: Cerberus, unnatural product of en-OMnomnom-ification
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August 7, 2010 12:36 AM
Insightful Ape @413
Because "winning" at any cost must be sought out no matter what?
I don't see how the repeated mantra of "we needed to do it to win" as a justification mechanism (cause that's what it is) works. Besides the factual inaccuracies, it actually makes the atrocity worse because it says we're willing to do anything no matter how depraved to win and that it doesn't matter as long as we win.
As such, "getting the win" is worth the complete obliteration of two cities and the slow poisoning of the surrounding areas for generations, national traumas, and an atrocity so bad that it hasn't ever been repeated (and even genocide gets a revive every 5 years or so).
What does that say about us as a people?
That we will turn to that explanation as if it absolved us rather than incriminates us?
About our ethical character as a nation?
A good nation acknowledges atrocities not seek to excuse them as "necessary" and especially not as "necessary" for as pathetic reasons as "durr, we needed to win a war".
Sadly, few nations seem to want to be good nations, our own included.
Posted by: UberAlles
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August 7, 2010 12:53 AM
I find the concept of a "demonstration bomb" laughable.
The japanese would have dug tunnels and bunkers in their homeland just like they did on the islands.
People do have a survival instinct, ya know.
Posted by: UberAlles
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August 7, 2010 1:04 AM
And ethics in a WAR?
Are you kidding me? Marquess of Queensberry rules?
Both Germany & Japan had nuclear programs. And if they had become functional, you wouldn't be here.
Wasn't the world a better place once WWII ended? Or, sure, 1946 would be a nice year to invade Japan? The cherry blossoms. . .
Posted by: Forbidden
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August 7, 2010 2:04 AM
I wonder if this is a generational thing. People of a certain age group growing up in the early or middle cold war seem to have a regard for nuclear weapons that is, quite frankly, akin to mysticism. As if an atomic weapon that kills 100,000 people is somehow more terrible than carpet bombing that kills 100,000 people. Sane and rational people look at the 100,000 number. But these other people equate nuclear with an unholy sin. I don't understand it.
Well, I guess we've found the woo still infecting the "New Atheists".
Posted by: John Morales
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August 7, 2010 2:12 AM
Forbidden, you think it sane and rational to judge a weapon merely by its kill-count?
Would you advocate the use of weapons such as mustard gas over conventional weapons, then?
After all, its kill-count is rather low, mostly it just incapacitates.
Posted by: Jockaira
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August 7, 2010 2:18 AM
@ broboxley #420
"Dianne #417 not eve one zero with a senior airman to fly up and back in a few hours? hardly.
_______________________
According to a wrap-up document of a damage survey from USAF and US Army done in the late 40's, a Japanese captain was dispatched to Hiroshima in a fighter plane to take a looksee and find out why all communications were cut off. The captain arrived there within an hour or two of the blast, circled the city, took photographs, and radioed his report along with his opinion that an extremely large explosion had occurred destroying most of the city.
The captain landed his plane, walked into the city and helped with rescue work while discussing with some what had occurred. He went back to his plane and finished his radio report with the conclusion that there was no clear evidence of a bombing attack.
At this point the High Command would still have been in the dark except for radio chatter intercepted from American forces which through that day and next would have been full of the story. Additionally, it would be naïve to assume that Japan did not have agents on the American mainland capable of communication with Japan. These agents would have been able to relay the news as it appeared on commercial radio and newspapers of the new weapon and the fact announced by the US government the same day of the blast that the Atomic Bomb had been used on Japan.
The Japanese government ordered all train service to Hiroshima stopped immediately due to damage to railroad tracks, in some cases, a mile or more from the blast center.
USAF began air-dropping leaflets in Japan the next day describing the nature of the blast, its results, and threatening to drop even more bombs and destroying more cities until the Japanese government surrendered.
There is no reason to presume that the Japanese government did not know what had happened by the end of the day, August 6, 1945.
Posted by: bulletproofcourier
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August 7, 2010 2:30 AM
@ Forbidden #427 I agree with you 100%. After reading the first 177 comments in this thread, I paged down to the last and yours indeed made the most sense.
Posted by: xaiviuspowers
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August 7, 2010 2:33 AM
Well PZ, after serious internal deliberation, I've looked at the article and linked discussion. From our perspective, I'd agree that destroying cities with nuclear weapons was largely callous. it was partly weapons testing, partly saving fuel from all accounts. I believe the use of terrorism somewhat downplays the fact that, yes, it was indeed terrorism, but most of the bombing campaign in the pacific theater was.
What terrifies me was that it was apparently quite routine by this point. That life had become so cheap that few enough people batted an eye to dropping city destroying single bombs is a truly terrible thing. That they were able to justify the campaign at all was horrifying. What part of the rational mind allows one to decide: "Well, we can't get them to stop, so we'll simply kill them all by burning the entire city down." Hundreds of thousands of lives lost, simply to "Make a point." It doesn't matter that there were people helping the war effort, or that they were military or civilian. This was indiscriminate killing to try and force a resolution.
I find I must agree that the use, in this case, was less "civic" than the leaders portrayed it, and that it possibly was more of a warning to the rapidly rising threat of the USSR than an effort to save lives. This mostly comes from the point that after Okinawa, the Allies had some time to work with, and thus the "rush" was largely unnecessary.
This in vein, I must point out that all major acts of war are essentially mass murder for political reasons. There is no honor on the battlefield, nor glory in "righteous" combat. It's simply people killing other people because they are "Them," whom oppose "Us." We forget that our opponents are human. That they share our genes, emotions, need for families, and even our need for stability. We simply see an "enemy."
This was not unique to any side, and one should keep in mind that no country came out of that war innocent, and the Americans were just as guilty as the rest. We always hear about how a megalomaniac Austrian signed the deaths of millions of people because of a burning, irrational hatred. We hear much less of the American who decided that firebombing entire cities was a viable solution.
I only hope that the positive that we as humans have brought out the incident in question is that war is not an answer anymore. It is entirely possible that it never was.
Posted by: John Morales
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August 7, 2010 2:59 AM
bulletproofcourier, if Forbidden makes so much sense, you might care to answer on Forbidden's behalf the question I posed immediately after that comment.
Posted by: Utakata
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August 7, 2010 3:18 AM
Forbidden @ 427 wrote:
"Well, I guess we've found the woo still infecting the 'New Atheists'."
As I also feel, that despite it supposedly defeat in WW2...that fascism is still alive and well in some of the thoughts being put to this thread. Just saying...
Posted by: McCthulhu is taking ∞ to eat all the pi
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August 7, 2010 3:49 AM
It's probably a very good thing we can't mess around with time, but it would be interesting to play with in one aspect. I'm curious to see how many people's reactions would be the exact opposite to what they are here if they were plunked down in 1945 without the benefit of historical analysis and a post WWII education. I couldn't bring myself to give the go-ahead to use a nuclear weapon against civilian women and children. Plunk me down 65 years ago, without any perspective, and maybe I wouldn't think twice about doing it.
I'm not admonishing anyone's opinion. But it certainly is easier to talk about something rather than being the one who has to make the decision to bomb or not, and all the myriad circumstances that may have been eaten by time and erased from historical record. And it's certainly MUCH worse seeing those bombers overhead and not realizing they were your, or your family's, or both's doom. You can analyze that 'til the cows come home, but that experience can't be passed on to history in any amount of words that carry the terrifying weight of having actually been there at that moment.
The most important lesson from the event is the sentence that follows almost every event from history, about remembering it to avoid the doom of repeating it. Whether or not you agree with PZ or not, at least he's brought this off the shelf and dusted off for discussion and a memory refresh.
Posted by: Forbidden
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August 7, 2010 3:54 AM
@JohnMorales
I judge a weapon by its effect. Mustard Gas is pretty nasty stuff, but if I had to choose between getting hit with mustard gas and having a bombed dropped on me, I'll take the mustard gas. I have a much better chance of surviving the mustard gas than getting blown up.But I don't see much of a difference between firebombing a city into the ground with mass amounts of convention weapons, hitting it with an atomic bomb, gassing it with a deadly nerve agent like Sarin, or rounding up and shooting every person in a city. (although, I suppose the latter two would keep the city buildings intact) They all kill absurd numbers of people in horrible fashion.
I, however, do not ascribe mystical power to the word nuclear. It is a terrible destructive device. But there is no shortage of methods to do horrible things.
Posted by: PS9
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August 7, 2010 4:12 AM
What galls me the most about the hypocrisy of nations is the hypocrisy of Israel. Their people blather incessantly about "Never again" while committing many of the very crimes against Palestinians that they were once victims of themselves - collective punishment, starvation, targeting of civilian areas, etc. Of all people in the world, they should know better.
Let's not forget Israel's two-facedness on Turkey: three years ago, when Turkey was backing Israel, Israel lobbied the US and the UN not to label the genocide of Armenians as genocide. Then after the Turks sent ships to Gaza this past Spring, Israel immediately began whining about the two million Armenians that were murdered. Oh - and the Turkish ship which Israel boarded was in international waters, not Israel's waters. It was a much an act of piracy as any hijacking by Somalian pirates.
Clearly, "Never again" applies only to other nations, not to "god's chosen people".
As for never again, the claim is (to put it politely) fucking bullshit.
http://www1.voanews.com/english/news/Cluster-Bomb-Treaty-Takes-Effect-99720009.html
However, major cluster bomb-producing nations, including China, the United States, Israel and Russia do not support the accord, arguing the munitions have legitimate military uses.
Cluster bombs are used to make land uninhabitable, to cause continuous and perpetual danger to the inhabitants of land, or to make it uninhabitable. The purpose of cluster bombs are to wound, maim and kill civilians, not militaries.
.
Posted by: John Morales
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August 7, 2010 4:21 AM
Forbidden, thanks for the response.
I might note that you've evaded the main point; you're still judging weapons by their kill-count.
Here was the main (rather than the ancillary) question I posed:
"you think it sane and rational to judge a weapon merely by its kill-count?"
You are aware that any regime with access to a chemical plant can easily manufacture very large quantities of mustard gas, whilst nukes are a touch harder to produce?
You are aware that someone incapacitated by mustard gas effectively becomes a non-combatant, with the added bonus that resources must be spent to treat and recover them?
So, do you consider factors such as these are irrelevant, so that they're not "sane and rational" to consider?
Note I'm not making any claims either pro or contra nukes, but about the basis on which you're evaluating them.
Posted by: defides
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August 7, 2010 4:21 AM
The Japanese had been told in mid-1945 that the Allies would accept only unconditional surrender. Their war plans from that point onward were of course based on that understanding.
However, after the nuclear attacks, the surrender negotiations resulted in conditional surrender - the nation was allowed to retain it's imperial character and even the Emperor who had led the nation into its attacks on China, the rest of Asia, and the United States.
In Max Hastings' book Nemesis, he makes the point that in essence America defeated Japan using only its Sixth Fleet. Yes there were other actions - Burma, the Philippines - but his thesis is that these were merely sideshows (the Philippines basically to mollify McArthur).
That being the case, and a huge armoured force on the other side of the world consisting of US, British, Australian, Canadian, etc. etc. forces, and given that Japan is totally dependent on imports for all its oil - army, air force, and naval fuel - it would have made far more political and military sense to just starve it out. A blockade carried out by the whole of the US and British navies would have been 100% effective. Actually, the Pacific fleet could probably have managed that on its own as well.
Of course this may very well have led to the starvation of thousands.
Evidence shows that elements within the Japanese administration were desperately negotiating for some sort of conditional surrender, saying over and over again that they could sell such a surrender to the people in charge if the Emperor was permitted to remain in place.
It is really hard to avoid the conclusion that a major part of the thinking behind the nuclear attacks was to prevent Soviet incursions into East Asia.
As somebody wrote elsewhere in the internet yesterday - if this had been to Americans rather than America, it would still be an everyday political issue in Washington.
Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold
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August 7, 2010 4:48 AM
You lied, but you do not consider that to be dishonest ?
You are a fucking idiot.
Why not just admit you were wrong ?
Posted by: bulletproofcourier
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August 7, 2010 5:28 AM
@John Morales What's wrong with judging weapons by their kill count? That's as objective as you can get. Everything else is a matter of taste.
Posted by: John Morales
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August 7, 2010 6:00 AM
bulletproofcourier,
It's exceedingly simplistic.
Their cost and ease of manufacture, storage, transportation, employment etc. are considerations that "sane and rational" people do not ignore.
And non-lethal weapons or area-denial weapons may at times be far more efficacious towards strategic or tactical goals.
And sometimes you want your own troops to occupy territorial gains within a very short time-frame, or you might wish to retake territory.
And sometimes there are friendlies mingled with enemy forces: Would the French have been especially grateful if the USA had nuked Paris when it was occupied by the enemy?
Is that enough to start with?
In fact, did you even read my #437? I mentioned there that incapacitating the enemy can be even better than killing them, in circumstances where you can only affect a proportion of them.
That one consideration alone should've made it clear to what I refer.
Posted by: Beijing
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August 7, 2010 6:15 AM
With all due respect, neither one of PZ Myers, Christopher Hitchens or AC Grayling is an military historian. And the general consensus between military historian is that A-bombs shortened the war and prevented more American and Japanese death from occuring. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.
Posted by: ATrampAbroad
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August 7, 2010 6:30 AM
I think that, when this sort of argument devolves into a discussion of the minutiae of military strategy, we can safely consider the debate to be dead. So it goes.
Whatever else may be true about America's motivation for using the bombs, I believe it has been demonstrated that two devastating atomic bombs were barely able to persuade the Japanese to surrender. As little as our commanders valued Japanese civilian lives, their value was even lower in the eyes of their own leaders.
There is a lot to be said against the lack of recriminations against Japan. By protecting the Emperor from prosecution we effectively guaranteed that Japanese war criminals could hide under the Imperial mantle. Imagine if Hitler had offered to surrender, on the condition that he be immune to prosecution?
That's exactly what the USA agreed to. Against the protest of the Russian and Chinese governments, the USA pardoned people who had engineered enormous crimes. The head of Japan's biological warfare section--who made Joseph Mengele look like Jesus--was not only pardoned but given a job by our own government.
Posted by: Gordy
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August 7, 2010 6:45 AM
Forbidded #427:
From http://hubpages.com/hub/Hiroshima_Bombing_Affects...and, distressingly, there's more if you read the whole article. Nuclear weapons don't just kill people in the blast, they go on killing, horribly, for a long time afterwards.Posted by: solius
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August 7, 2010 6:51 AM
Wow! Great read.
I too am one of those that might not be here had there been an invasion, but that is irrelevant.
For 35 years I have had conflicting thoughts on the use of that horrible instrument. One the one hand, I can see that it might have saved lives(unconditional surrender), but on the other, the nagging knowledge that Japan was already a government that was defeated tugs at my heart for such loss.
I guess that one can make the argument of context. And, for me, that is where the rubber meets the road.
It is clear that the Truman didn't have a fucking clue about anything going on in that war. Rosevelte's choice was political. At Postsdam, it was clear that he was over his head,and then, when Churchill lost the election... well, Uncle Joe owned the show. That agreements decided at Malta were set aside at Potsdamn are telling, and have reverberations to this day.
One must remember that this was before the shit in Azerbaijan, Keenan, London Conference, Churchill's speech, but some scholars were skeptical, and hence... "speak softly and pack a big stick", or better, "fuck 'em, kill 'em all, let God sort 'em out".
That's some fucked upped shit!
Posted by: Carlie of the lacy, gently wafting adjectives
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August 7, 2010 7:41 AM
Another take on the bombing:
Are we Omelas?
Posted by: simonator
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August 7, 2010 8:15 AM
I would never say that the bomb was necessary and good. After all, if we had never developed them, there's little doubt that we WOULD have won. So not necessary by any means.
There's considerable debate on what would have been the tipping point that would have gotten them to surrender in the absence of atomic bombing. All the purple intercepts and diplomatic cables told us that was that SOME people in the government wanted to surrender, and that others wanted to fight to the bitter end. The same was true in Germany in 1944. But the War in the West didn't end with Hitler's assination, but with Russian troops raising the flag on a destroyed Reichstag. We didn't know who would come out ahead in high level debates, and most importantly we didn't know what was going on in Hirohito's head. Because HE personally ended up being the "deciding vote." While the idea that "Hirohito never had anything to say except to end the war," is largely a myth promulgated by Macarthur in the post war period because he though the guy would be more useful as a figurehead than as an object lesson, there's little doubt that his personal decision is what ended the control of the militerastrs in the cabinet.
Good? No it was a terrible evil. It's not that those of us that defend it's use don't realize it's evil. Rather, we realize that by any objective measure it WASN'T noticeably more evil that what we were already doing, and planning to do. We were already firebombing Japanese cities so effectively that we could pretty much calculate when there would by no urbanized area left, at least in the Southern half of Japan. The naval blockade would eventually have resulted in widespread starvation. Invasion was going to kill huge numbers of civilians. A "demonstration?" Since the bombing of Hiroshima was insufficient by itself, the idea that an bombing an unpopulated atol would have been enough is a fantasy. Waiting for them to surrender, since they'd obviously already lost? EVERYBODY knew that they'd lost. But they showed every indication of being willing to fight on to avoid an unconditional surrender.
The only alternative that might have been noticeably LESS evil was to offer them "more acceptable" surrender terms. And "more acceptable" here meant leaving the Emporor and the cabal that had started the war in charge. It wasn't about who was going to win, it was about what the terms of surrender were going to be. And we really didn't want to have to "do this all over again" in twenty years. Only an uncoditional surrender would enable us to attempt to remake Japanese society from the ground up in a way that would prevent future militarists from seeking a "rematch."
Posted by: Pacal
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August 7, 2010 9:19 AM
What is fascinating is how the the decision to drop the bomb is justified. The usual arguement, expressed in such books as Thank god for the Atom Bomb by Paul Fussell is about how those who gainsay the decision to drop the bomb are foolish sentimentalists, who don't understand war and the then war situation. That they lack the tough mindedness necessary in war and are mired in a sentimental fog.
What of course is absolutely fascinating is how those so called realists and tough minded people are also sentimental in their own way. They refuse to use such words as "massacre" "atrocity" "mass murder" "war crime" "crime against humanity" to describe the bombing. They studiously avoid using such tough minded unsentimental language to describe the bombing.
The fact is the vast majority of the victims were civilians and that the bombs were even more destructive and frankly indescriminate and hard to escape from than conventional area bombing.
It is remarkable how many people who excuse the bombing use the arguement that it helped to end the war don't seem to understand that even if that was the case it still is an atrocity, a mass murder of civilians a violation of the Hague conventions, a war crime and crime a against humanity.
As for actually ending the war. Well it should be pointed out that the entry of the Soviets into the war just after the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima was likely even more important than the dropping of either bomb. Certainly it shook the Japanese leadership. Of course what was also important was that the Emperor intervened decisively (finally!!) to get acceptance of the surrender.
There also were available a few more bombs to be dropped just in case these two didn't work.
What is of interest is also that it appears that before the bomb dropped the Japanese were willing to accept almost any terms, what the Japanese were willing to accept was the retention of the Emperor as a condiion and surrender unconditionally aside from that. Of course after the bombs were dropped the Americans accepted that the Emperor would be retained and told the Japanese who then surrrendered. So ironically despite the bomb the Japanese did not surrender unconditionally.
In war engaging in atrocity to terrorize the enemy into surrender is an all to frequent tactic. And it is also one that works frequently, although at times it backfires or simply doesn't work. Assuming that the bomb worked to hasten the surrender of Japan. (I frankly doubt the arguement that an invasion would have been necessary at all; Japan would have more likely than not surrendered before than.) The arguement seems to be that some how that it is justifiable / excusable if dropping the bomb resulted in Japan surrendering. If that is the case than all sorts of atrocities throughout history become justifiable / excusable. In fact even if they don't work they become justifiable / excusable because the intention was to shorten the war and get the enemy to surrender. During the war the Japanes engaged in China in various spectacularly brutal campaigns called the the "three alls" meaning burn all, loot all, kill all, during which millions of Chinese civilians were murdered directly and indirectly. The purpose was to terroize the Chinese into submission. The Nanking massacre could be viewed in a similar fashion.
The dropping of the atom bombs purpose was to terroize the Japanese by destroying two Japanese cities and massacring large numbers of people in what was then a truly jaw dropping stunning manner. The debate over how much it had to do with Japan finally surrendering will go on with in my opinion no final resolution.
It is quite grotesque to hear how after the war those involved in the dropping of the atom bombs got so defensive and upset when their acts were described as crimes, atrocities etc. So much for realism, tough mindedness and a lack of sentimentality. About themselves and their decision they seemed to wallow in it.
What will also continue to go on will be those who argue that the bombing was justified will continue to decry their opponents as lacking realism and tough mindedness while avoiding using such tough minded and realistic words to describe the bombing as massacre, atrocity, mass murder, war crime, crime against humanity. They seem to competely lack the realism and tough mindedness to call a spade a spade.
Posted by: broboxley OT
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August 7, 2010 9:23 AM
Cerberus #423
In your Post #412 you have a long explanation of what PZ said and what he meant in a previous 2 sentence post. There was a huge amount of extrapolation and extensions by well intentioned referral in your post which was why I alluded that was how religions got started.
A well meaning short statement by a revered figure and the next thing you know 2 centuries later they are passing collection plates in his name.
Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold
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August 7, 2010 9:53 AM
Yes, you are wrong. As I have pointed out previously, there no reason to actually invade the Japanese Islands.
I also note you totally managed to write the British, Australian, New Zealand and all other non-Americans out of the picture. Which suggests your knowledge of military history is piss-poor. It also suggest a disturbing degree of nationalism.
Posted by: Robert H
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August 7, 2010 10:06 AM
bulletproofcarrier @440
It's not an issue of how many you kill, it's who and why you kill. The intentional targeting of civilian populations is at the very least an immoral and heinous act. It also violates various aspects of the Hague Conventions. Ultimately the debate over this weapon of mass destruction versus that weapon of mass destruction frankly is disgusting. Killing innocents is disgusting. War in general is disgusting. Talking "rationally" about irrational acts is repugnant and infantile.Posted by: Silič O'Nopolitanopoulos, Färschdbischuf Beesknees aus Ulm und Klein Elguth, Elector Pharynguline.
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August 7, 2010 11:25 AM
Hitchens is many things, but he's not naïve, so I honestly do not understand, how he can one moment say that Speer was a pathological liar (I have little doubt he's right), yet the next believe what he's told by Edward Fucking Teller about his opposition to bombing civilian targets.
The only difference I can think of, is that Hitchens has not had the opportunity to chat to Speer.
Posted by: Petzl
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August 7, 2010 12:06 PM
Ridiculous suggestion, fool. And refuted long ago. So we bomb an isolated area. Then what? We also drop leaflets over Tokyo, saying "Hey Tojo-- go have a look-see at [isolated area]. Uh, that was us, dude! And we can do it again!" And by the way, your little demonstration would've wasted HALF of our nuclear armory at that time. (Side note: if its a dud, we really look dumb.)-
As for "worst-case" scenario, every island we took on the way into Japan was a "worst-case" scenario. You really think the mainland is going to be easier than the islands: with many, many more soldiers IN supply (as opposed to being cut off). It was going to be a bloodbath for both sides. What you call "worst-case scenario", the US army calls a "projection":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#Estimated_casualties
Posted by: Matt "Nora" Penfold
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August 7, 2010 12:12 PM
Care to explain why it would have been necessary to invade the Japanese Islands ?
And care to explain the Japanese collapse in the face of the Soviet advance into Manchuria ? What happened to the ferocious resistance there ?
Posted by: Trent Voigt
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August 7, 2010 12:14 PM
One question is why did the allies need the Japanese to unconditional surrender?
I think you need to look at it from the perspective of the generation who had just one generation earlier fought a bloody and devastating war that came to a negotiated close without annihilation of one enemy. Just a mere 21 years later Germany rose again and the price of blood had to be paid again to get peace.
The leadership of the 2nd World War had fought in the bloody battles of the 1st World War and knew what they were facing. But from their experience, the only way to prevent it happening a third time would be to totally and unquestionably defeat their enemies, no matter how bloody and costly it would be, as it would save their children's generation from having to repeat the cycle of slaughter that modern technology was making even bloodier by the day.
Add to that the mindset of the Japanese at that time who thought that surrender was as abhorrent to them as we would think of people who torture civilians, and the decision to drop the nuclear bombs and kill so many civilians is a lot more understandable, if not excusable.
Posted by: kdv666
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August 7, 2010 1:11 PM
As I write this, I can lift my eyes from the screen and glance at my mother-in-law on the couch opposite. I suspect most of those in this thread weren't alive in 1945. She was. I suspect most aren't Japanese. She is. I am pretty sure most weren't in Hiroshima on 6th August. She was a couple of km from ground zero, by sheer chance working in a strongly constructed storage facility, which didn't collapse, and, possibly more importantly, she was surrounded by lots and lots and lots of stuff.
She took her toddler son and her mother and walked for about three days away from Hiroshima. They lived. Her first husband stayed, looking for other family. He died. Later, she remarried, a medical officer who had received his callup and was to report for duty shortly after the 6th. So her first husband was one of countless Japanese who died because of the bomb, and her second was one of an unknown number who may well owe his life to it. As may my father, who was then involved in fighting in New Guinea with many of the Australian Army. ( Admittedly, however, the New Guinea campaign was probably decided by the triumphs of the American Navy and American codebreakers at places like the Coral Sea and Midway. Thank you! )
Hisako is 90 now, and physically pretty good. Her dementia has, sadly, robbed her of all ability to communicate over the years, so my knowledge of her experiences is second-hand, through my wife. Apparently, Hisako never really expressed anger at the USA in general, nor the atomic bomb in particular, for what she went through, both during and after the war. Her anger was directed towards the generals in Japan who started the war, and the emperor (Hirohito) who enabled it. They were the ones who bore her contempt as being responsible for the terrible things she saw and experienced. Apparently she then, and certainly my wife now, harbours somewhat ambivalent feelings toward that horrific event on August 6th. They know more than most the unspeakable tragedy and suffering which occurred, yet they also recognise a broader context ( as have several posters here ) where a world where the bomb was not dropped may well have been much worse for the Japanese, both then and now. Note, I used the word ambivalent, because they are/were not completely sure of this.
Perhaps my wife and her mother might be spared being referred to as "trolls" or "irrational" or "nuclear apologists" or "racist" or "subhuman" as some have been called here for daring to express similar ambivalent thoughts, or for daring to question the simplistic "nuclear bombs are a bad thing" mantra. OF COURSE nuclear bombs are bad. OF COURSE war is bad. But unless you subscribe to an absolute position of total pacifism, and thus hand absolute power to those who are prepared to be most brutal, is there not at least room to discuss in a civilised way the circumstances where such things become terrible necessities?
For the most part, that discussion has not happened here. I have read through something over 450 posts, and a rough guess would be at least half of them would partly or solely consist of ad hominem attacks, mostly against those who try to inject some complexity into the argument.
I gave up reading comments in this blog some time back, precisely because of this tendency. I continued to read PZ because I find his pieces both interesting and informative, and I read this comments thread only because it was a topic near to me in more ways than one.
What is different now, however, is that PZ himself has joined the mudslinging, calling those who commit the simple sin of disagreement with him both trolls and irrational. Clearly they are neither, whether you agree with them or not. This is disappointing, because the initial post was interesting, the sort of thing I often learn from when facing views differing from my own.
So this, my first post here, is also to be my last. Just as I can't be bothered reading posts from those who substitute abuse for reasoned discussion, I now must apply the same criteria with PZ. As soon as this is submitted, I'll be deleting this blog from my list.
Anybody who wants to make themselves the alphas of cyberspace ( in their own eyes ) by hurling abuse at me, please go ahead. It won't bother me, I won't be reading it.
Posted by: SundogA
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August 7, 2010 1:27 PM
I've been a silent watcher on this blog for some time, but this post has drawn me to actually sign up and post.
To say that I find the concept that the atomic bombings of Japan were terroristic or otherwise beyond the appropriate conduct in war repugnant, wrongheaded and factually incorrect is to grossly understate the case. Allow me to explain why.
I will begin with some of the more common fallacies.
1: Civilian targets: Neither Hiroshima nor Nagasaki was a civilian target. Hiroshima, in particular was the Headquarters for the Imperial Japanese Navy. More, by the standards considered at that time, area bombing of cities for the purposes of denying their productive capacity to the enemy, either through direct destruction of manufacturing or by displacing and demoralizing the workforce, was considered acceptable and worthwhile practice by ALL combatants. The concept that this was against the laws of war was not taken seriously by ANY of the governments involved, and since the laws of war, as any international agreement, draw their power only from consensus of the agreeing states, it can reasonably be said to not have BEEN against the laws of war.
2:The bomb didn't end the war - This could be argued...if we didn't have the Japanese records showing that that was EXACTLY why they surrendered. The records were kept. We know the sequence of events. We know that the Japanese government decided NOT to surrender after Hiroshima, and that they were basically deadlocked after Nagasaki, until the Showa Emperor, in possibly the only decision he ever truly made as ruler, forced their hand. Even then, there was an attempted coup before the orders to surrender went out.
3:The Bomb cost more Japanese lives than necessary This is the hardest fallacy for me to understand - because it is the exact opposite of the truth. The Bombs were responsible for the saving of amsssive numbers - on BOTH sides.
In 1945 Harry Truman had three primary options before him. The first, and the one most favoured by the military was Operation Downfall, the military invasion of the Japanese Home Islands, starting with Operation Olympic (the invasion of Kyushu) and continuing with Operation Coronet (invasion of southern Honshu, and in particular the Kanto Plain, upon which Tokyo sits)
The second option was to continue and tighten the blockade of Japan, to economically and logistically strangle the Empire into submission. The third was the Atomic weapons he had (only fairly recently, since the death of Roosevelt)been apprised of the existence of.
The important thing to remember here is that both of the alternatives Truman rejected would without doubt caused Japanese civilian casualties in the multiple millions, where the total casualties for the bombs, even considerng long term effects, is probably still short of seven figures. Indeed the worst possibility would have been to risk virtually NO American or Allied casualties - the Blockade. Japan, then as now, was incapable of feeding itself. Post war, the allies threw millions of tonnes of food aid into Japan - and there were still many deaths from hunger and malnutrition. How many would have died? Estimates vary, but as many as five million would be a good bet.
Had Downfall gone ahead, the fatalities would have been less...probably. At least, on the Japanese side, due to a swifter resolution. But balancing this would have been the thousands upon thousands of Allied dead and injured. There would be no strategic surprise here, as there was attained at Normandy; the use of Kyushu as a staging ground for operations into Honshu was painfully obvious to anyone studying Japan's geography. And we know the Japanese saw it coming.
After studying the losses of men at Okinawa, the US military came to the conclusion that we would lose between 1.5 and 4.5 million men in a fully conducted Operation Downfall. After the fact, and with knowledge of the Japanese counter plans (Operation Decision), those studies have been criticized as being significantly too positive as regards allied casualties.
Which, in fact, was the point. Japan could NOT win World War Two at this point. What they COULD do was to make the invasion and occupation of Japan cost too high a price for the Allies to be willing to pay. Operation Decision focussed most of their surviving assets in Kyushu - if the Olympic section of the invasion either failed or cost too many casualties, Coronet would never be launched.
However, they had a backup plan: The Kanto Plain Strategy. This was remarkably elegant in it's simplicity: wait until the US/Allied forces entered the Kanto plain. Then, having previously equipped every resident capable of moving with whatever weapons were available (mainly bamboo spears), send them ALL at the allied forces with one order: Don't die until you've killed an American.
Of the choices Truman had, he chose the best one, not for the allies alone, but also for the Japanese people. It ALSO saved many thousands of prisoners of war - since it forced the Japanese to surrender far sooner than expected, the orders (already approved) to execute all remaining POWs were never sent.
The Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a terrorist act. It was the most merciful possible end to a time of immense horror and still greater suffering.
It is now 1:30am here, I must sleep, but I will be back tomorrow if anyone has any questions.
Posted by: Forbidden
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August 7, 2010 2:23 PM
@JohnMorales: I don't understand... The discussion isn't about weapons bans here. The discussion is whether the atomic bombs on Japan were somehow more terrible than the carpet bombing that was, quite frankly, routinely done at the time.
I submit to you that destroying a city is an atrocity, and whether it is one atomic bomb or thousands of firebombs, it is the same thing.
Someone else brought in a nurses account of the aftermath. They should look into the aftermath of what happened at Dresden. It was every bit as horrific. Heck, look at even modern things like napalm and fuel-air bombs. It's every bit as obscene as the aftermath of an atomic bomb.
As I wrote early, anyone the speaks with glee of killing anyone needs to have their head examined. I merely suggest that using atomic weapons was the least bad of an incredibly bad situation. It should never be an easy decision. I brought up "Cold Equations" earlier. Using atomic weapons on Japan was just like spacing the young girl. It was horrible. But it was better than spacing the medicine that would have condemned millions more to death.
There was no perfect answer. People brought up on television and the mythology of the word nuclear are fooling themselves into thinking that if they had just waited a little longer, some magical solution would appear and everything would have somehow worked out, since that's always the way it happens on television and they've been brainwashed to the point of being completely unable to discuss anything involving the word nuclear in a rational fashion.
Posted by: choupick
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August 7, 2010 3:01 PM
The bombs were a best of a bunch of bad options. Perhaps if you had spent some time island hopping (or even reading about the war in the pacific) you would change your mind. I am amazed at the decisions arm chair quarter backs will make when provided nearly complete safety.
Even the dropping of two bombs did not convince all the Japanese generals that they should surrender, which hurts the validity of your "just bomb an atoll" idea.
Seriously, I love your stuff on atheism and science, but when you write about the military I feel like I'm reading something from a young earth creationist. You should start out with "I ain't no expert on fightin or nothin, but..."
Posted by: simonator
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August 7, 2010 3:12 PM
SundogA: Just to note that one has to regard contemporary casualty estimates for downfall with a bit of suspicion. The USAAF and the USN tended to give high estmaates and the Army Ground forces tended to give lowball estimates since they advocated different strategies.
Certainly a reasonable case can be made that the area bombardment and firebombing of cities is unjustified whether it is done by a single bomber with a nuclear bomb or an entire wing of 100s of bombers equipped with high explosives and incendearies. Evidence suggests that a majority of people believed this in 1939. At some level, the problem is that in Europe, between Dunkirk and D-Day there was little else that the Western Powers were capable of.
Posted by: Al B. Quirky
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August 7, 2010 4:38 PM
I wonder if Germans (similarly) slash their wrists over their bombing of London in 1940; they started it after all. Same goes for the Japs.
Posted by: alfred
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August 7, 2010 6:28 PM
The argument has been made countless times on this blog that the only other option to nuking two Japanese cities, was a blockade that because of a failed harvest would have resulted in the starvation death of millions of civilian Japanese. Given the expected demographics of this site its scares me that no one has pointed out the massive faults in this argument. Firstly to take it for granted without question that millions would have died displays the presumption of a soothsayer. Who knows how many would have died? Then there is a difference between killing a hundred thousand people instantly then asking the leaders to surrender, or blockading a country resulting in the slow starvation of the population. People don't die of starvation overnight, it takes weeks to die with the likelihood of food riots, peasant revolts and even revolution and the leadership could have chosen to surrender anytime. They would have had the time to deliberate and consider. This would also have shifted the blame of civilian deaths onto the Japanese leadership, and by blame I mean moral blame.
and some from #96 which demonstrate that saving lives was not the motivation behind the nuking.Also there are a number of quotes, completely ignored by the nuking apologists, from American leaders at the time like this one from #130
Another thing that pisses me off about some of the posters(actually a scary amount)on this site is the extreme nationalism displayed by most Americans. Extreme nationalism is revealed when the acts of the other nation are seen as barbaric, inhumane, criminal but the same acts committed by their nation are rationalized or even ignored, so lots of mention is made of Japanese cruelty and barbarism by people from a nation that murdered even burning alive at least four million Vietnamese merely for the crime of having a different political ideology than most Americans or killing over six hundred thousand Cambodians in a three week carpet bombing spree, for? ...actually I don't have a clue. Ask Henry Kissinger. (who in one of the most ludicrous actions in human history was awarded the Noble Peace prize) I am sure the Hiroshima apologists on this site will probably come up with some obscure reason. How about a country that committed the largest environmental crime in human history; the poisoning of millions of hectares of Vietnamese forests resulting in tens if not one hundred thousand severely mutated Vietnamese babies born. Isn't that justification for nuking some of its cities? A poster also made the distinction that while the Germans have demonstrated remorse and apologized for their war crimes and crimes against humanity the Japanese have not. Well America has also not shown any remorse for its war crimes and crimes against humanity. Many Americans on this blog glorify their army with terms like courage, honour serving their country, protecting their country, protecting their freedoms, without any regard for the fact that it has killed millions of innocent citizens of this globe. There is even a poster on this site who with Glen Beck level intelligence derides Noam Chomsky and Howard Zinn, who along with Richard Feynman are the most intelligent Americans in history.
The argument is also made by these nationalists that war is ugly and therefore it’s okay to target civilians or countries go to war and civilians are part of countries so therefore one can kill them. These arguments of course justify 9/11.
The average intelligence of the citizens of a nation is inversely proportional to the number or ratio of national flags displayed.
I judge the sanity of people by the level of violence they are prepared to reach.
Posted by: John Morales
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August 7, 2010 7:28 PM
Forbidden @458:
I think the discussion should be about the OP; that is, whether nuking Japan was a war-crime or not, and how future generations might judge us for it. That you think it's about what you've written says a lot about you.
You do realise that whether it was worse or not than Dresden doesn't change that? An atrocity is not justified because other atrocities have been committed, in any sane and rational ethical calculus.
Also, I'm not sure how you came to think I was writing about weapon bans — I thought I was quite clear and specific.
Look, this was your big insight: As if an atomic weapon that kills 100,000 people is somehow more terrible than carpet bombing that kills 100,000 people. Sane and rational people look at the 100,000 number.
I was pointing out that perhaps sane and rational people have other criteria for judging outcomes than merely the kill-count, and began with what should've been a simple question that, had you answered directly, would have led to further considerations. But that's gone now.
Those weapons also generate the fallout plumes, induced radiation and genetic effects that "Little Boy" did?
IOW, it was necessary for the greater good, and the ends justify the means, and the powers-that-be had taken every effort to prevent this situation from occurring, and the victim bravely if reluctantly acquiesced?
(The Cold Equations also relied on the gimmick of there not being enough ejectable mass to spare the girl, BTW. This, in a ship with a closet! This amongst other flaws in logic — not that it matters, one suspends disbelief in stories.)
Posted by: Robert H
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August 7, 2010 8:01 PM
As much as I admire Chomsky, Zinn and Feynman (just finishing up one of Feynman's autobiographies) the statement is virtually impossible to defend.And although I appreciate the panache of "The average intelligence of the citizens of a nation is inversely proportional to the number or ratio of national flags displayed." the average intelligence, by definition, of any large population approaches 100.
Overall, I agree with your analysis. Too bad it appears so, late in the thread.
Posted by: Robert H
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August 7, 2010 8:18 PM
One of the fallacies of comparing atomic bombs to other means of mass carnage, such as fire bombing, is that one doesn't face the risk of destroying the entire biosphere with conventional weapons whereas if we pull a Dr. Strangelove there is the distinct possibility that there will be no one (or any sentient thing whatsoever) left to be ethically outraged, conduct inquiries, or blog about the false equivalency of nuclear and conventional armaments..
Furthermore, less than eight years from Trinity we conducted the Ivy Mike shot, with about 400 times the yield of Hiroshima. The largest Soviet test was another 5 times larger than Ivy Mike. Pretending for a moment that Hiroshima and Nagasaki are similar outcomes, what about unleashing Tsar Bomba? Can we still talk equivalencies?
Posted by: Forbidden
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August 7, 2010 8:27 PM
That one's easy, there was no treaty forbidding it, ergo, no war crime. Since there was no contravention against the use of atomic weapons, then the only question can be to look at the effects of said use. The effects were no worse than elsewhere. It had some different effects than other city-bombings (for instance, cancer and burns more than lost limbs), but calling them worse is a stretch. If one bomb kills 100,000 people, and another bomb kills 50,000 but also gives 50,000 people cancer, which is worse? Of course not. War is an atrocity. War is not moral. WW2 was not "the good war". There are no good wars. It was all terrible. There is no reason to focus on Hiroshima and say "This was a crime against humanity" but then ignore Dresden. Everything there was bad. It's only because people have attached mystical status to atomic weapons is the question of Hiroshima focused upon. Then what is your criteria? I jumped to the kill count because it was easy to type and death is pretty much the top of the ticket. Like the murderer that goes away, nobody cares that he was also convicted of conspiracy to commit grand theft auto. It's the top of the indictment that gets the press. No, but they have their own long term problems. Is there a moral difference between someone who experiences long term radiation damage, lost limbs from shrapnel, muscle destruction from severe burns, lung issues from toxic smoke inhalation, or poisoning from ingesting depleted uranium fragments that fell into the water supply? I don't see it. They are all horrific. Now you're just floundering. The point is that they had a situation with few choices and none of them good ones. Of course it was contrived. That was the point. It is a moral question.But the logic was largely sound. A closet is empty space, it contains, effectively, little to no mass, only the weight of the air inside it. Space travel isn't like flying in the atmosphere. A difference of one degree means you're millions of miles off your target. The question isn't size, it's mass. In space, size is, essentially, irrelevant. There is no resistance, so the equations are entirely on the basis of mass vs. thrust. (and then you need to toss in the effects of gravity, which is also a function of mass)
The situation wasn't a normal one, it was "We have an emergency, this is a dangerous mission to get this medicine there as fast as humanly possible", the pilot accepted the risks of having a very low safety margin in order to save as many people as possible. It is perfectly acceptable to say "They should have detected the extra mass prior to launch", and that's a fair argument. An equally fair rebuttal is "When human beings are in a hurry, they miss things".
Another way to think of it is like race car drivers that won't fill the tank up to maximum on their last pitstop. They only fill up enough to finish the race, since it means the car will weigh less and go faster. If race car drivers could do the math so perfectly as to just barely be able to get over the finish like running on fumes, they would, because that would mean their car is as light as possible. If someone were to jump into the car at that last pitstop in such a case, the car would run out of gas before the end of the race. Is doesn't matter that it's a stock car with plenty of room inside it. It's the weight, not the volume.
Posted by: Multicellular
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August 7, 2010 8:50 PM
Hiroshima was bombed on 6 Aug. Russia declared war on Japan on 8 Aug. The next day Nagasaki was bombed. Russia did not have the capability at that time to conduct an amphibious landing of Japan. Russia invaded Japanese held Manchuria on 8 Aug but the Japanese mainland was not under a direct threat by the USSR (one could easily assert that the reason the USSR entered into the war at that time was to take advantage of the situation and capture territory long disputed by Russia and Japan). Japan was directly threatened by US bombers and troops waiting off the mainland. Did the Russians entering into the war influence the Japanese decision? You bet, but the 400 lb gorilla in the room was the US and it's ability to level cities using both nuclear and conventional bombing along with the thousands of troops literally off the coast ready to invade. To say Japan surrendered primarily due to the USSR entering the war is a simplistic view of a complex situation. Truman knew the Russians declaring war on Japan would be a factor, but by dropping "the bomb" he had an opportunity to damage the Japanese war industry while simultaneously applying the threat of a new weapon upon the Japanese psyche. Yes, dropping the bomb did prevent my old chemistry teacher from having to invade Japan - because Truman and the US higher command authority decided to wait and see if the threat of atomic weapons could persuade the Japanese to surrender without an invasion - you see, atomic weapons not only had an affect on the Japanese; the war weary US also hoped atomic weapons would persuade the Japanese to see the futility of their efforts in the face of such destructive capability and end the war, which had been costly for both parties, so they held back in the hopes that an invasion wasn't necessary.
Posted by: John Morales
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August 7, 2010 8:52 PM
Forbidden,
Ahem. It would be kinda hard to have a treaty forbidding the use of a weapon that was developed quite late in the war, and unknown to the world until it was used.
But I note: Article 22 of the Hague IV ("Laws of War: Laws and Customs of War on Land (Hague IV); October 18, 1907") states that "The right of belligerents to adopt means of injuring the enemy is not unlimited", this a treaty to which the USA acceded in January of 1910.
More to the point, you're suggesting something is only an "crime against humanity" (not "war crime", please re-read the OP and what I wrote) by de jure rather than de facto considerations.
Yes, I know that's what you think.
Because there's no significance whatsoever in the fact that Hiroshima took one raid by a heavy bomber and one bomb weighing four tonnes, whilst Dresden took four raids, 1,300 heavy bombers and more than 3,900 tons of high-explosive bombs and incendiary devices. Right?
I don't care to address the rest of what you've written, except this:
It was a contrived and unrealistic story with only two choices, meant to illustrate a situation where all participants could be excused any moral blame. And you think this is analogous to the circumstances applicable to the nuking of Japan.
Sheesh.
Posted by: John Morales
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August 7, 2010 8:54 PM
PS actually, the true point of the story was that, in Scotty's famous words, "A canna' change the laws of physics". But what I wrote above still applies.
Posted by: UberAlles
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August 7, 2010 9:39 PM
Myers, Grayling and Christopher Hitchens are just amazing in their ignorance.
War is immoral? Well la-di-da. Tell that to the soldier with the rifle pointed at you while you sit in a grave pit you helped dig.
I go with Malcolm X. Stop the war by all means necessary.
And just to make the 3 intellectuals all warm & fuzzy, every able bodied person in Japan would have been forced to physically defend their Homeland.
Peaceniks. God love'em.
Posted by: John Morales
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August 7, 2010 9:44 PM
UberAlles, simpletons are easily amazed.
Posted by: Robert H
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August 7, 2010 10:04 PM
UberAlles (Why not Gott Mit Uns?) The goal is to stop jackasses from creating situations (i.e. wars) where soldiers (who are rarely those same jackasses) have rifles pointed at them. Wars have causes; the number one cause of most wars we have been involved in is the aforementioned jackasses, and I'm not referring to their jackasses, I'm referring to ours.
And for what it's worth, here is Malcolm X's actual quote:
We declare our right on this earth to be a man, to be a human being, to be respected as a human being, to be given the rights of a human being in this society, on this earth, in this day, which we intend to bring into existence by any means necessary. Note "any" rather than "all". The best way to stop a fight is to make sure it never starts,
Posted by: SundogA
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August 7, 2010 10:52 PM
Simonator: Quite so, and in the lead up to Downfall (which was still being conducted as the bombs were dropped, as a backup plan) various numbers were being bandied about. For this reason I have used the numbers provided by Secretary of War Henry Stimson's staff in their study of the matter, as the least likely to have been tainted by service rivalry.
Alfred: Who knows how many would have died? Unfortunately, we do.
Simply put, Japan had already run out of food as of August of '45. When the population has nothing to eat, the political situation doesn't matter that much - people die. First, the old and the very young; then the very fit, who have no fat reserves; finally, the regular people start to succumb. You may have heard of the rule of three - three minutes without air, three days without water, three weeks without food. Starvation is the longest, but it is just as certain, and with all the good will in the world that Japanese govenment COULD NOT feed it's population. As it happens it didn't try; most of the remaining food was detailed for the soldiers under Operation Decision.
Immediately after (indeed, starting well before) Japan's official surrender a massive wave of food aid was winging it's way from the US, Australia, Canada and the British Empire's overseas holdings. Even then, thousands died, either of malnutrition or outright starvation.
The most optimistic outcome of a blockade would have been three months. I, and most who have studied the problem, consider this hopelessly naiive. The WORST outcome would have actually been failure, the Japanese government choosing not to surrender at all and defying the blockade...in which case Japanese casualty figures are projected as being 50%. Half of the country, dead. Oh, and don't imagine a coup. Starving civilians can't stand against fed troops, and the troops would not have rebelled - as we saw at Guadalcanal through to Okinawa, their loyalty to their Emperor was beyond death.
How many would have died? We can't know precise numbers, no. But the OVERWHELMING evidence of massive, heartbreakingly cruel megadeath canot be denied.
Finally, while I have the greatest respect for Chester Nimitz, he made that statement BEFORE we had received and translated the Japanese government archives, if I recall acurately. He was mistaken, a mistake born of ignorance of the true situation.
Posted by: Forbidden
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August 7, 2010 11:18 PM
How does that affect the moral question? That is a technical issue. Morally, blowing up a city over the course of four days or one day is irrelevant. The issue is blowing up the city. I have yet to see a realistic scenario ending WW2 that did not involve mass casualties. That's what I was referring to, not the story.Posted by: John Morales
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August 7, 2010 11:35 PM
Forbidden:
It doesn't.
It specifically addresses your claim that "It's only because people have attached mystical status to atomic weapons is the question of Hiroshima focused upon."
My responses are to that which I quote.
One weapon, one city is an equation that scares sane and rational people. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the only exemplars of nukes in action, so of course they're focused on — they're not hypotheticals.
The issue with nukes is not moral (other than in an extremely tangential way), it's pragmatic.
Nor is it "mystical" to sane and rational people, it's that nukes are a whole different cookie to conventional weapons — not least because there's no credible defence against them.
One nuke here or there is no biggie, but massive use of conventional weapons is not likely to disrupt civilisation and pose a genuine risk of a major extinction event by ecospheric degradation.
Posted by: simonator
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August 8, 2010 12:08 AM
John Morales: Really, you're conflating our modern arsenal of large ICBM-borne nuclear forces with the much more modest weapons of 1945. OF COURSE sane people worry about nuclear weapons and regard any sort of exchange with our immense arsenal as insanity of the worst order, carrying with it levels of destruction that would dwarf what happened in the second world war. Remember that this discussion is about the morality, practicaly, and "reasonableness" of using the much more modest weapons that we had in 1945.
It is interesting to see people condem Truman for dropping the atom bombs in WWII without seeming to realize that by NOT using them in Korea, HE is largely responsible for the idea that they are QUALITATIVELY different weapons not to be used short of "total war."
Posted by: John Morales
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August 8, 2010 12:30 AM
simonator, interesting how you come to that conclusion from my comments herein, wherein I'm arguing Forbidden's supposition @427 that it's a generational gap based on irrational mysticism which is the basis upon which nukes are supposedly held as an "unholy sin", the which is indicative of "the woo still infecting the "New Atheists".
This I do because I think Forbidden is wrong in said supposition.
Posted by: UberAlles
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August 8, 2010 12:58 AM
@ Robert H.
Thanks for the full quote of Malcolm X. I really liked how he evolved into a thinking man.
I agree we all should be rational if not outright courteous, but I remember all too well in my younger days personal experiences (on an individual level) with bullies who engaged me for their personal gain.
There will always be people who take shortcuts and exploiting whatever/whomever comes to hand. From "gold-diggers" to dictators the lessons of self reliance should not be ignored.
P.S. UberAlles (Why not Gott Mit Uns?) I wanted a moniker that was absurd/nonsensical, but right for propaganda. Every opinion is propaganda.
Posted by: UberAlles
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August 8, 2010 1:02 AM
@ John Morales
Haven't read all your posts, but I think you've got them on their heels.
The Woo is high, deep & handsome herein. Hahahahahaha.
Posted by: John Morales
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August 8, 2010 1:02 AM
UberAlles:
Wrong.
Posted by: Alice Bluegown
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August 8, 2010 7:09 AM
@ Cerberus: I am generally sympathetic to the argument you made in #399, but you did manage one paragraph of concentrated fail:
The citizens of what was then called the United Kingdom & Commonwealth would respectfully disagree with that assertion. I'll be the first to assert the Russian contribution to WW2 as absolutely crucial, but that's seriously stretching it.
Operation Torch (invasion of N Africa): November 1942
First USAAF daylight raid on Occupied Europe: August 1942
As to the Pacific, I think the direct attack on US soil by Japanese forces may have tilted the priorities.
I can't comment on US attitudes towards Dresden, but here in the UK it's been agonised over for almost 70 years, with or without Vonnegut.
As to the atomic bombs - yes, an atrocity. But this was a war in which all the combatants had already compromised their humanity, over six years of bloody conflict on a scale we can barely comprehend today. How else was it going to end, other than by deployment of some "ultimate weapon"?
Posted by: ConcernedJoe
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August 8, 2010 7:36 AM
Well I am late to the game. Wanted to read and digest all.
After much renewed soul-searching I circle back to the conclusion from my youth very close to the event. That conclusion - and that of the adults surrounding me was and remains that it was the lesser of two evils. It saved lives and spared suffering all-around. Yes it was horrible - sad - but that war was to the max anyway.
Look I am not a detailed historian nor saying my conclusion is right (not saying it is wrong either - who really knows - on things like this you can only judge people on did they do what they thought was overall best best - that is the lesser evil).
I do wander into the wishful thinking realm of PZ - we maybe should have tried to just show them the power we had and without the human destruction hope the war would end with only a innocuous demonstration. Others have taken this premise on herein - pro and con. Very rationally. Hard to say. Certainly the urgency of the situation of the day weighed more heavily during the day. Again I conclude (perhaps tainted by my youth) that we made the decision that had to be made.
I might add that although the adults around me were very angry this all happened - especially those involved in the Pacific as many had lost much and suffered much at the hands of the Japanese, they cared enough about us children to abstract the Japs from the Japanese and the Nazis from the Germans. I do not remember any word that suggested they were in the least happy for the suffering war imposed on their counterpart mothers and fathers, and children, and friends, and relatives, etc. But we were children and they did their swearing outside of our earshot.
War is hell and war is full of cruelty. It is about as unnecessary and wasteful as it gets from a rational perspective. I have wet eyes over our cruelties in WWII - I have even more for my involvement in the cruelties in the Vietnam War.
If I were a just god Truman would probably get a pass - Johnson and Nixon - well I am not quite sure.
Posted by: blockhead
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August 8, 2010 11:05 AM
at 406, PZ wrote:
“Yes, Japanese culture was militaristic….Now put your 21st century goggles back on, and look at the US. Who is fighting wars of aggression in this century? Who advocates torture and prison without recourse to the courts?”
I agree 100%. In my opinion, what we have done to Iraq is morally and politically far worse then dropping the A bomb. But your comment has nothing to do with WWII or the use of the bomb, except maybe as a precursor to our state today. The USA was not a militaristic nation in 1940 and neither was Great Britain. We in the USA were isolationists and had to be attacked before our re-arming and going to war was feasible.
I disagree with Hitchens opinion-just as I disagree with his passionate arguments in favor of invading Iraq. Hitchens is a great writer and thinker, but his ego will not admit to monumental error,imo.
“History is not going to judge us kindly for this crime against humanity. Never again.”
Never again, I can agree with that. But 21st C googles can be blinders as well. Half-assed, ill informed moral judgements about everything, let alone something as complex as this, are a dime a dozen. The entire WWII was a crime against humanity. Glossing over history, editing facts out of the picture, loses the lesson.
Posted by: Robert H
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August 8, 2010 1:28 PM
UberAlles @478
Speaking for myself, I'm a Peacenik who doesn't care or need to be loved by god, but thanks for the sentiment (I know: you didn't really mean it). On the other hand, it's not the peaceniks (a word coined by the much-lamented (if you have Bay Area roots) Herb Caen) who are naive, it's those who wish/lust to rush to war totally oblivious to the consequences of their desires who are the real ingenues, as they will find out 5 or 10 years later as they drag themselves out of their foxholes or shelters, look dumbfounded around at the total devastation they have visited upon themselves, see themselves for the fools they are, and swear not to be fooled again until the next generation comes along and does it all over again. Those god-loved peaceniks learned from the errors of the previous generations and know where the next war inevitably will take them, so they work to smother it in its cradle.
I believe people and nations have a moral right to protect themselves from invasion. I also believe that individuals have a moral right to choose not to do so. That being said, when is the last time we were invaded, short of Pancho Villa, and the Japanese on Attu and Kiska? It's been a bit, hasn't it. Next thought: when is the last time we were attacked without provocation? Not 9/11, not Pearl Harbor, not recently-have we ever? My history is fuzzy. The last time we attacked without provocation? March 20, 2003. The cost: 4000+ American and allied lives, a minimum 100,000 trending up to 1,000,000+ Iraqis, and $1 trillion+ in resources, to say nothing of the incineration of the mythos of America as a nation of law and integrity. When's the last time the peaceniks and the affiliated Dirty Fucking Hippies were wrong to oppose a war? Not Viet Nam, not our innumerable proxy wars in Central and South America, not Gulf War I, certainly not our current military nightmare in Iraq. I allow some room to maneuver in re our initial involvement in Afghanistan but our continued presence is an affront to human dignity and a casus belli for the wild-eyed maniacs of the world to perform some asymmetrical horror on innocent civilians (gee, who told them it was acceptable to target civilians?) in the style of 9/11, or maybe this time à la Hiroshima (thank our lucky cookies it's okay to use nukes against civilians).
As far as opinion equaling propaganda, that would have to be a pretty perverse definition of opinion and of propaganda to make it work. Although not quite Orwellian you do get partial credit for attempting to vitiate both words. However I will afford you that saying "opinion is propaganda" will be viewed by many as propaganda. Squealer would be proud!
I am deeply moved by Malcolm X as well. How do you think he would react to the current war?
Posted by: UberAlles
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August 8, 2010 3:41 PM
Robert H
Opinions are propaganda because they are conclusions based on an incomplete set of facts. "Expert opinion" (an oxymoron) is using someone's specialized experience along with an incomplete set of facts to achieve a legal conclusion which a judge or jury will take into deliberation.
When one argues with an incomplete knowledge of a situation well. . . that's what we all do because the facts are lost to time or are merely beliefs. Can you say 'woo?" That's why we like the scientific methodology. We get more facts.
A very casual look at recent human history (2000 years) and there are very few years with no fighting, conflicts or wars. Somewhere, someone was exercising his desire to be an aggressor. You don't always get to say "just say no" to war. It tends to spread until responded to with force.
I agree with everyone who thinks the US has meddled needlessly. I would love to have all the tax monies that I have paid that was applied to the cold war and such. Our oil embargo of Japan forced them to attack us. Our support of a Jewish state enrages the Arabic community. Our policy of 'stabilizing' foreign governments with artificial democracy should stop. Close the UN so that the US no longer has world military obligations. Close every foreign military base world wide so that we won't be able to meddle anywhere in the world at our convenience.
Just remember that the taliban rose to power low tech style. No navy, no air force. And wars, crusades, jihads tend to spread. . .
In my opinion, the solution will come of itself when cheap, clean energy can be obtained anywhere on this planet. A lot of conflict, personal & social, evaporate when the costs of civilization are made minimal. Solar, geothermal, wind won't be enough for 9 billion people. Something else will have to come into existence. That day may be hundreds of years from now, but "Peace in our Time" won't be because of people 'wooing' for peace. I call that the 'Neville Chamberlin Syndrome."
As for Malcolm X. . . Iet his legacy of growing into wisdom speak for itself. Until we have prosperity for all, it is what we must be to help those around us who are less fortunate.
Posted by: Robert H
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August 8, 2010 5:50 PM
My Webster's Ninth New Collegiate Dictionary yields the following for propaganda 2: the spreading of ideas, information, or rumor for the purpose of helping or injuring an institution, a cause, or a person 3: ideas, facts, or allegations spread deliberately to further one's cause or to damage an opposing cause, definition 1 having to do with a part of the RCC. My handy-dandy computer dictionary, an Oxford American, yields propaganda 1 chiefly derogatory information, esp. of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote or publicize a particular political cause or point of view. Sticking with the computer because it's easier and my eyes don't have to strain as hard we get the following for opinion a view or judgment formed about something, not necessarily based on fact or knowledge The terms, at least as here defined, are hardly similar. I trust the majority of people would prefer the dictionaries' definitions over your own. Using idiosyncratic definitions is an obstacle to communication.
There are many areas of discourse where opinions are given because there can be no readily agreed upon set of facts: A is cuter than B; strawberry ice cream is better than chocolate ice cream, etc. When able to refer to both opinion and fact on a specific matter opinions are overall less desirable than facts; we ought to strive for the clearest, i.e. most reality based, information we can obtain but their secondary preference in discourse does not make them propaganda, which tends to be presented as fact anyway. In the end, opinion is not propaganda (the statement being an example of fact, as demonstrated by the above definitions) whereas stating opinion is propaganda is an opinion, i.e. (your) subjective interpretation not readily backed up by exterior sources.
I personally said NO! to war almost 50 years ago. I realize such a position has its risks, and as I stated up-thread I am convinced people and countries have a right of self-protection, if they so choose to defend themselves. At the same time, virtually every war we have been involved in over the last 150 years has been a war of aggression. The question again arises: why are there wars? It's not sufficient to say someone was exercising his desire to be an aggressor; why have we (I assume you're a Yank, if not please accept my abject apologies) found ourselves over and over in foreign lands blowing up the citizenry? Find the causes of war and strive to eradicate them. In the words of Dr. King; No peace without justice, no justice without peace.
Although I agree with much of what you say some of your contempt for people who worked for peace rankles. Because we are opposed to war somehow makes us Neville Chamberlain? King, Gandhi, Chamberlain: the New Mt. Rushmore. Why don't you just cut to the chase and call us Quislings or Commie Dupes, or Dirty Fucking Hippies? Peace as soon as we all have teleporters and can synthesize a cup of hot chocolate from its component atoms. Cool!
Posted by: John Morales
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August 8, 2010 5:51 PM
Propaganda.
More generally: Propaganda.
Posted by: SC OM
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August 8, 2010 6:06 PM
OK - I've read virtually none of this thread.
Bullshit. Look at the history of colonialist military engagements in (for the US) the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Asia* in the 50 years preceding 1940.
Start here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_military_operations#1890-1899
Look at GB's colonial military engagements in this period.
*Did you know US soldiers were waterboarding people (amongst other tortures) in the Philippines at the turn of the 20th century, and defending the massacres of civilians there?
Posted by: SundogA
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August 8, 2010 9:16 PM
Actually, SCOM, the US was doing a LOT worse than merely waterboarding during the Moro Uprising, including mass slaughter of defenders inside Moro Cotta forts, and the hanging of insurgents in raw pigskins (the Moro were muslim) from trees to die of heat prostration. On the other side, it should be equally noted that no American who fell into Moro hands survived (death by slow torture was the standard) and they were equally bruta towards non-Moro filipinos, when they didn't simply take them as slaves. Also, US forces found it very difficult to capture any Moro, including women and children, despite numerous attempts to take Cotta without massacreing the inhabitants - literally the entire population of the fort would fight to the death.
The Moro war was by no means a high point of US foreign policy, but neither were these actions either unprovoked or unreasonable given the time and situation.
I'm also going to call you on that "Bullshit". The statement made was quite true - the United States, in 1940, was NOT a miltaristic nation (for Great Britain, the situation was more complex). I would rebut your evidence, but you have provided none - only that the US HAD BEEN a militaristic nation some forty years earlier.
Posted by: SC OM
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August 8, 2010 9:36 PM
Massacre. See Mark Twain.
On the other side, what were the US military doing there, fighting Filipinos?
Want to talk about injuries vs. deaths, you slime? What were they doing there? What did they think they were doing there?
Among other military actions, to put it fucking mildly. In fact, it's completely illustrative of US foreign policy, before and since, as anyone can learn.
Read: given racist imperialism.
Bullshit.
Posted by: SC OM
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August 8, 2010 9:50 PM
Does that not say it all?
Posted by: UberAlles
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August 9, 2010 12:08 AM
Robert H
"Using idiosyncratic definitions is an obstacle to communication."
I love that sentence. My restatement of opinions are propaganda is to direct our attention to the voice behind the post. As we see with the big 3 names PZ has published for this post, all of them don't understand war. But all of them have an agenda to argue. To me that is propaganda. You can state facts & conclusion therefrom that are truthful, but to the opposing side you are spouting propaganda.
"why are there wars?"
Take the US Revolutionary War, Civil War & WWII. Vastly different origins. No one is going to define causes of war and have a preventive procedure for any and/or all causes. There will be no agency, standing or to be formed, with the capital. Besides wouldn't strings be attached. And we all agree that we don't want to meddle with others or others meddling with us.
What makes us individuals, makes all of us aggressors, is we compete for scarce resources. Fortunately most are like you & me, willing to negotiate and share and purchase, which keeps the world a fairly nice place to exist. Others, a significant minority, take shortcuts.
"Because we are opposed to war somehow makes us Neville Chamberlain? "
I am amused that PZ thinks he can shame people into modifying their behavior. That is so quaint. That is why I brought up Chamberlain. He probably worked his fingers to the bone to diplomatically engage Hitler. But how do negotiate with cancer or a megalomaniac? They can't be ignored and they tend to spread.
I want everyone to oppose war, because I want to live as blissfully as possible. So do not stop. Try hard. Good hunting (sorry).
I say find a way to spread energy so that every one can live comfortably. A cheap, clean & efficient mass to energy transfer machine is what needs to be pulled from the ether of science fiction. Wow, now I'm talking the woo.
I don't know about teleporters, but a cup of hot chocolate sounds great. If we ever meet I'll buy you one.
Posted by: TimKO,,.,,
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August 9, 2010 5:24 AM
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#Estimated_casualties
Posted by: Robert H
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August 9, 2010 11:51 AM
UberAlles @492
My restatement of opinions are propaganda is to direct our attention to the voice behind the post. My guess is that what it does is make readers assume that you don't know what you are talking about without paying attention to "the voice behind the post"; most of the readers will skip blithely over your comments and the majority of those who stay around to comment will do so because they feel a certain animus toward you and want to try out their epithet collection. If you are attempting to use agitprop it isn't working.
...we all agree that we don't want to meddle with others or others meddling with us. are you being ironic? I can't tell for sure.
I don't accept the statement that we are all aggressors, which implies that we are all actively aggressive. Were you to state that we are hard-wired for aggressive behaviors as one of several systemic strategies for survival (sorry for all the esses) I would accept it-no need quarreling about our DNA. As you point out in your next sentence we also cooperate with others in our group to our mutual benefit which is a strategy where aggression is counterproductive. In that we share at least some of these behaviors with our primate cousins I believe that they also are at least partially genetically derived, though culture obviously becomes a significant driver as well.
I would argue that for most people the world isn't a "fairly nice place to exist". 3 billion people, almost half of the population, live on less than the equivalent of $2.50 per diem. Factor in health care and basic human services, opportunities for social advancement, freedom from aggression, tolerance, et cetera, and you get a world where the majority are not having a pleasant time. In the US alone, about 40 million people live at or below poverty. My recollection of being poor and hungry was that it sucked.
Tossing Chamberlain in everybody's face because you are upset with PZ is a tantrum. Again, you alienate more of the people you are trying to address. If you have issue with him insult him not those who are working for peace. As for working with Hitler, prevention is (as with cancer) always easier than cure. Something other than the disastrous Treaty of Versailles would have been a good start, though derailing the Guns of August would have been even better. For that matter, bolstering the Second Republic so Louis Napoleon never rose to power would have been better still (admittedly, my Second Republic history is fuzzy so if I overstep please forgive). Wars morph into wars. Wars do arise from need (as I trust most in the coming century will so be) but most arise from ignorance, arrogance, intolerance, and greed. So you stop Hitler by treating the German people decently after their defeat. You don't humiliate then; you don't bankrupt them; you don't abrogate Wilson's Fourteen Points and impose your own set of revanchist policies. Therefore Chamberlain gets to serve his country and the world in a capacity more akin to his skill set and doesn't lurch through the annals of history a broken and disgraced man.
I agree that adequate energy is one of the root needs of humanity but an increased social awareness and sense of place on this planet is necessary as well. In the past when energy access has gone up so has population. This no longer is a viable option. In the end, in order to live as a technological society we need to grow up as a species, and do so fast.
I'll take you up on the hot chocolate but I need mine made with soy milk if you don't mind: I'm a vegetarian by choice and lactose-free by necessity.
Posted by: Robert H
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August 9, 2010 11:59 AM
UberAlles-almost forgot, Howard Zinn was a bombardier in WW II and was involved in one of the first military uses of napalm. I trust Zinn knew about war.
Posted by: Dianne
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August 9, 2010 12:00 PM
No post on 9 August?
Posted by: erikthebassist
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August 9, 2010 12:30 PM
ffs, 494 comments. Sorry, I had to stop reading at 200 and something, but I do have $.02 to throw in, so go ahead and flame me if anything that follows has already been argued and lost.
First of all PZ, what's this "we" shit white man? Are you all of a sudden adopting the Christian idea that sins are inheritable?
"We" won't be judged by history, the people that made the decision will. I am not any more responsible for what happened than I am for the Iraq war, seeing as how I didn't vote for Bush and was powerless to stop it, so please, don't burden the rest of us with your guilt trip.
"But you benefited from it" (imaginary response I've heard from others, not meant to put words in PZ's mouth.) Right, and I also benefited from slavery, the wiping out of native Americans, the revolutionary war. We all stand on a pile of suffering and corpses. I can't change history and I bear no guilt for it.
I do have empathy for the suffering of others, and I do what I can to make sure my actions don't directly or indirectly lead to it, but that's all I can do.
Show me a free country that has no innocent blood on it's hands and I'll gladly move there as soon as I can convince everyone I care about to do the same.
------ Clear break, warning, everything from here on is probably redundant, feel free to skip if you are burned out on the argument :)------
Now on to the question at hand; Not being anything approaching a historian myself, I have no way, aside from an immense commitment to research that I'm not willing to make, of evaluating the contradictory claims here about whether the bombs ultimately saved more lives than they took.
I started reading this thread having somewhere picked up the notion and accepted it that they did, but now I'm not so sure. To me, this is the ultimate question. If a convincing argument can be made that the choice was the lesser of two evils, then I don't see how we could rationally call the decision makers "evil".
If on the other hand, it turns out that less devastating choices were ignored, then we get to judge history a little bit differently. I don't pretend to be well informed enough to choose a side here, but thanks to all who are for giving me more to think about on this issue. That's why I bother to read the comments here.
To wrap my pea brain around this, I'm imagining the analogy of an intruder in my home. If I successfully fend him off but then chase him down and shoot him in the back as he flees in defeat, I am a common murderer. But if I have reason to assume that his escape will only allow him to regroup and attack again, then I'm justified in blocking his escape.
Of course this analogy fails in comparison as I'm making a snap decision with out the luxury of weeks or months in which to evaluate the situation and come to a calm rational decision.
And that may be the breaking point for me, the one thing that pushes me off the fence in favor of PZ's POV. There was time leading up to this in which to consider options, options that did not include the wholesale slaughter of hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians caught in the cross fire.
By today's moral standards, it should be considered butchery, but judging history by the moral zeitgeist of the day is always folly.
There's a reason it was called the war to end all wars, if only it were true. I read one comment above that stuck out as particularly rational: #120
Oh and FTR, I know I'm way late to the thread but it looks like I'm not the only one, so I thought it was still worth trying to contribute.
Posted by: erikthebassist
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August 9, 2010 12:39 PM
let me head of the flaming a bit, I shouldn't have used quotes around "We", PZ said "History will not judge "Us" kindly", but you get the idea.
Posted by: Robert H
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August 9, 2010 1:38 PM
World War I was called The War to End All Wars, a catchy phrase used by Wilson, who also called it a "war to make the world safe for democracy". He was, unfortunately, wrong on both counts.
Also, alas, butchery is no more of a concern for "us" now than it was 65 years ago: Rwanda, Darfur and Iraq all caused the (preventable) deaths of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of civilians.
Posted by: erikthebassist
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August 9, 2010 2:10 PM
Like I said Robert, I'm no historian, history is my weakest subject, always has been. I just don't have a memory for dates and names. Thanks for the correction.
Posted by: erikthebassist
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August 9, 2010 2:30 PM
Also Robert, I didn't mean to ignore the second half of your comment. I too am disgusted by genocide happening in the light of day while we as a nation stand by and do nothing. I applauded Clinton for stepping up in Bosnia but was disgusted by his lack of action in Rwanda, and later Bush's lack of response in Darfur.
On these modern atrocities I of course feel a sense of indirect personal responsibility. I suppose I could be chaining myself to the Whitehouse fence but really, would it do any good? I feel powerless, but maybe that's just an excuse to do nothing?
In the case of Iraq, I'm with the Hitch. We needed to do something, but Bush's bafoonery made the situation worse, not better. I agreed with the war in principle, but not in practice.
I give to Oxfam, I vote for the leaders I think I more likely to do the right thing, although there is no clear choice in American politics.
What else, practically, can I or you do?
Posted by: Robert H
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August 9, 2010 4:37 PM
I suppose our actions are directly correlated to our senses of urgency and of outrage. Most of us are not cut out of the cloth of Rachel Corrie or Philip Berrigan.
Posted by: UberAlles
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August 9, 2010 4:39 PM
Where US tax dollars are being spent.
Obama Care?
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2010/08/u-s-afghan-mega-base/
Posted by: Aaron Baker
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August 10, 2010 10:11 AM
This "and to little material effect" is an irritating weakness of Grayling's (and your) argument. A rough consensus has emerged among historians of WWII that Allied bombing was ineffectual to start with, but gradually became very destructive (in 1944 and 1945) of Nazi industry, transportation, and communications. For a good statement of that consensus, I recommend Richard Overy's chapter on Allied bombing in Why the Allies Won. Given its in fact substantial material effect, we're left with a much more difficult moral problem than some of the posters here are maintaining. With the technology of the day, there was no way to bomb effectively without killing thousands of civilians; but bombing was indeed effective. Given those facts, was it right or wrong to bomb?
Posted by: KG
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August 10, 2010 10:25 AM
- erikthebassistYou're a dupe, like Hitchens. The invasion of Iraq was not about Saddam's violations of human rights (there was far worse going on elsewhere at the time), nor about WMDs (which they knew damn well didn't and were not going to exist in the quantities that could do serious damage), nor about links with al Qaeda (there were none). It was about gaining military bases - these will not be relinquished when the "combat mission" ends; and control over Iraq's economy, particularly the oil industry. While more expensive than expected, it has been a great success from the point of view of the American elite.
Posted by: Aaron Baker
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August 10, 2010 10:35 AM
Well, I'm at a disadvantage, as I'm in transit and I can't listen to the Grayling/Hitchens discussion, where Grayling is alleged to substantiate these claims. Somehow, Gerhard Weinberg, whose A World at Arms is the most meticulously documented (and up-to-date) one-volume history of WWII, has missed all this. I think (though I'm ready to be convinced otherwise when shown PROOF) that this is just Hitchens repeating a bunch of never-substantiated Cold War revisionism: the US bombed Hiroshima (and Dresden) to send a message to Stalin, and so on. Hitchens formed his opinions while still a leftist, and while this stuff was fashionable.
Posted by: KG
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August 10, 2010 10:37 AM
Aaron Baker,
If anything, you're understating the case. According to Adam Tooze in The Wages of Destruction, which focuses on the Nazi war economy, attacks on the Ruhr in May-July 1943 had a considerable effect:
Reading contemporary sources, there can be no doubt that the Battle of the Ruhr marked a turning point in the history of the German war economy, which has been grossly underestimated by post-war accounts. - p.597.
Posted by: KG
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August 10, 2010 10:46 AM
- ForbiddenThen you haven't looked. As I noted earlier on this thread, shortly after the war ended the official US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that Japan would have surrendered by the end of the year, and probably by 1st November: "even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.". The reason being, that Japan was wholly dependent on south-east Asia for supplies of oil, tin and rubber, and had lost all access to these supplies. It simply could not long continue to function as an industrial economy.
"Amateurs think about strategy; professional think about logistics." - Old military maxim
Posted by: KG
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August 10, 2010 10:58 AM
Posted by: Aaron Baker
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August 11, 2010 12:24 AM
Well, KG,
I've been reading Max Hastings' excellent Bomber Command--and just today I got to his account of the Dresden attack. And--what do you know--the Brits did it (in no small part at least) to please the Russians! (The Russians had been pressing for bombing raids on east German cities, and Dresden was part of Bomber Command's effort to oblige them.)
Hastings quotes pre-attack briefing notes that say, among other things:
(This might be read as conveying a threat to the Russians; but I don't think so. British tardiness in opening a second front in Europe had long a been a sore point with Stalin--and the bombing campaign had been offered up before as a means by which the British had been pulling their weight. So I think this was more of the same.)
As to Alperovitz: I don't know; he's exactly one of those revisionists whose theories have been subject to pretty withering criticism since he wrote. What revisionists have long maintained is that the atom bombings were intended primarily or solely to scare the Soviets. I'd be surprised if the possible effect of the attacks on the Soviets never
entered into American thinking on the subject; but the important question is: was frightening the Soviets the principal or sole motive for the attacks?
Posted by: John Morales
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August 11, 2010 12:41 AM
Aaron, I'm unclear: Do you think Dresden constituted an atrocity?
Posted by: Aaron Baker
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August 11, 2010 1:51 AM
John Morales asked: "Aaron, I'm unclear: Do you think Dresden constituted an atrocity?
Yes. Maybe I should have said that. (The exclamation point above wasn't meant to suggest levity--but rather that yes, the Brits apparently did have as stupid a motivation as KG said they did.) I find Hastings' argument persuasive that the war was all but won, and that devastation of German cities at this point contributed nothing to the final victory. Therefore, Dresden wasn't just an atrocity, but one for which (if I'm right in agreeing with Hastings) there was no practical effect that anyone can offer as either a justification or an excuse.
A more problematic issue is raised by the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, because I believe for reasons I've already stated that they shortened (or helped shorten) the war. Like Dresden, however, each was the intentional killing of thousands of defenseless people. If that's not an atrocity, what is? So I think that those attacks were atrocities, too--but atrocities that brought a significant benefit--thus the knottiness of the moral problem they confront us with.
(Incidentally, Myers' argment that the Americans should have blown up an atoll as a demonstration makes a fair amount of sense to me--though I think such a demonstration probably wouldn't have done the trick, for reasons others have stated. What was the harm to the U.S. in trying anyway? It has to remembered that the Allies had been killing civilians by the thousands for several years when the decision to bomb Hiroshima was made. There really is something to the view that the people who made that decision had long been desensitized to civilian death.)
Posted by: SundogA
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August 11, 2010 1:57 AM
SCOM, some final points:
You may well have some points to make here. I am not perfect, and I, like all humans, can get things wrong from time to time.
However, in this case, I do not care about your points. Apparently, for the crimes of disagreeing with your inaccurate preconceptions, I am "slime", "loathsome", and am an "Imperial apologist", and your final words "am making you sick". This, despite having restricted myself strictly statement either of fact or positions I could easily defend.
Thus, it is clear you are not interested in civilized communication or debate. You have staked out your position and will not be moved.
Congratulations, Fundamentalist. I hope you are happy in your self-made religion.
Posted by: Aaron Baker
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August 11, 2010 2:03 AM
One other thing about Dresden: it was a British and American atrocity, as an American wave of bombers attacked the city, too. The Americans often compared their "precision" bombing favorably to British area bombing--but much of that precision was illusory--and in the last months of the War they were area-bombing as much as the Brits were.
Don't want to give the impression I'm letting Yanks off the hook.
Posted by: John Morales
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August 11, 2010 2:13 AM
Thanks for the response, Aaron.
--
SundogA, you do not care about SC's points, and you think SC is religious and a capital-f Fundamentalist, this because SC finds you loathsome and odious after you presented what you consider factual or defensible positions.
Interesting.
Care to elucidate what be these fundamentals to which SC adheres, and how they manifest religiosity?
Posted by: SundogA
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August 11, 2010 4:16 AM
Certainly. Religion has a marked tendency to ignore argument or reason in favour of emotional diatribe and vilification of the debator. SCOM's replies indicate to me that he has set his position and is ready to attack anyone who dares disagree, without regard for the arguments posed, thus making those positions not ones of knowledgable argument, but of unreasoning faith.
Thus my comparison to Fundamentalism and charcterization of his "position" as a religion. It matters not what is believed, but only that he unreasoningly believes it.
As to my lack of caring regarding his points, I will simply state that anyone who chooses to react to polite disagreement with offensiveness and crudity is not worthy of my time.
Posted by: John Morales
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August 11, 2010 4:24 AM
Sundog, thanks for the response.
It is illuminating.
Posted by: Aaron Baker
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August 11, 2010 12:21 PM
While I'm at it, I'll share these passages from Gerhard Weinberg, A World at Arms, on the American decision to use the atomic bomb (from pp. 886-887):
Weinberg has extensive footnotes listing the documents on which he bases this account. He goes on to point out that the Potsdam Declaration quite intentionally did not mention the Emperor, as a hint to the Japanese that unconditional surrender need not require giving up that institution. As I've said before, the Potsdam Declaration was unambiguoualy rejected; whereupon the U.S. waited a few days to see whether there were second thoughts in Tokyo (Weinberg, p. 888).
From all this it should emerge that, though there were advocates of surrender, they weren't yet winning the debate; and that the widespread assertion that the diehards would have given in if only they knew they could keep their precious emperor is simply false.
Nowhere does Weinberg cite evidence of prolonging the conflict so that the U.S. could use the atom bomb (quite the contrary), or of scaring the Russians as a principal motive (or indeed any motive) for dropping the bombs. As I've said before, I won't be surprised if some document indicates an American interest in the effect of the bombings on the Russians; but assertions to that effect here have so far been just assertions, without any cites to such documents--let alone to evidence that scaring the Russians was the prime or sole motive for the bombings.
I think, therefore, that the theory Japan was about to surrender, and so the bombs made no difference, has been demolished about as thoroughly as a theory can be demolished. It doesn't follow that it was morally right to drop the bombs--but we do need to come to grips with what actually happened if the debate is to be more than a lot of wasted breath and ink.
Posted by: blockhead
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August 11, 2010 1:42 PM
The US was imperialistic and hegemonic in 1900 and in the Phillipines, Cuba, the Caribean, and central-south America. But the US and Great Britain were NOT militaristic in the same sense that 1930-1945 Japan and Germany were. In both countries, the entire society was geared to a war footing 24/7. I would also argue this is functionally different from the militaristic, hegemonic beast the US has become since 1945. The US really was an isolationist country in 1940. Its a fact not propaganda. Just look at the votes in Congress or the newspapers. By 1945, however, this had all changed after 4 years in brutal war we did not initiate.
Posted by: blockhead
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August 11, 2010 2:01 PM
correction: The US was imperialistic and hegemonic from about 1885 right through 1940, as proven by our actions in the Phillipines, Cuba, the Caribean, and central-south America throughout most of that time period. We used a relatively weak military or its threat to get our way and protect our imperialistic ventures. This is NOT militarism in the sense of Japan and Germany.
Calling "peaceniks" Neville Chamberlains is conservative lies and propaganda, usually. Calling people who defend the A-bomb droping warmongers and bloodthirsty is the same sort of mindless namecalling, usually.
Historians are split on this issue. I could make some arguments against dropping the bomb, but I havn't seen many in the original post or in most of the comments above, which are terribly ill-informed about provable historical facts and events. In my opinion, these facts and events, as well as arguments based on them, far outweigh those against. In any event, there is more then enough gray area to make simplistic moral judgements irritating to my sceptical ears.