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Did We Need to Nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Degeneve said:
One of the reasons sometimes evoked in some readings is that the USA did not wish an involvment of the Soviet Union into the war with Japan because this would allow the Russian to share the control of Japan and to move they army in China.
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Which is odd because The US asked Russia to declare war on Japan during the Potsdam conference.
 
abaddon said:
WTF? You would prefer millions of casualties on both sides instead?
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The argument being made is that the war was going to end anyway, so that the millions of additional casualties would not have occurred, and that this non-nuclear surrender would have made the atomic bomb drops unnecessary, so that the people who died there didn't need to die.

It is not an argument I am in agree with, but your post is a very inaccurate straw-man of what the OP is proposing.
 
As usual in history: we will never know. We don't know why Japan surrendered. We don't know when they would surrender if nukes were not used. We don't know how the invasion would proceed.

Nukes were not stronger then conventional strategic bombings. And strategic bombing in general never before lead to collapse of morale. Strategic bombing did work in decreasing workforce and distributed industry of the enemy, which worked especially good in Germany .. but can it outweigh the terrible loss of civilian life ? I personally don't think so. IMHO strategic bombing is inhuman, same level as concentration camps. So that makes the bombing a bad thing.

There was no doubt certain psychological effect - 1 bomb, city gone. In that respect, any use of psychological effect, possibly leading to the end of the war is IMHO a good thing.
And I think it did actually help. Not in a way that it would strike terror into minds of military government .. they really didn't care about anyone .. but in a way that it gave an argument to the emperor to stand against the government.

Also the bombs simply HAD to be used. If not in Japan, they would be in Korea or Vietnam. US had them. They needed to test them. Sooner or later, at least one city would get erased. And like this two got .. but that was it. The horrors and potential of nukes was beyond what people imagined .. and it took some time to really realize that. In different scenarios possibly lot more bombs would be used, before the effects were understood. Also in 1945 only US had nukes, and there was no danger of retaliation .. few years later, Soviet Union would have nukes anyway (cause spies) and situation would be lot worse. So all things considered, this real world test of nuclear weapons actually went well, only two cities were destroyed, only the first nukes build were used, and after that we (humans) got a lot of time to think about what we've done.

So in the end I think it did help ending WW2. And as I mentioned above, it started the nuclear age in quite favorable way .. it might have saved us from WW3. But I don't see how anyone could be proud of that. Lesser evil is still evil ..
 
Ugh, This nonsense again?

Yes, several prominent high ranking Generals and Admirals complained about the bomb after it was used. I don't care. Ask the grunt who fought onn Okinawa or any of the other islands. Tell them they would have to fight longer in their misery because some glory-hounds didn't like having a bomb steal their thunder.

As for a naval blockade....really? You realise that would have killed millions of Japanese by starvation, and killed millions more on their occupied states, right? This is your idea of mercy?!

Japan was trying to surrender? According to who? At their best they put out some very-not-serious peace feelers which could be charitably be described as a ************ way of trying to call a time-out. The conditions were only of benefit to them: "OK, we lose. Bad on us. You go away now, and we'll fix everything up after you leave". Yeah, no.
 
crescent said:
The argument being made is that the war was going to end anyway, so that the millions of additional casualties would not have occurred, and that this non-nuclear surrender would have made the atomic bomb drops unnecessary, so that the people who died there didn't need to die.

It is not an argument I am in agree with, but your post is a very inaccurate straw-man of what the OP is proposing.
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I think you wildly underestimate the will of the Japanese to fight on to the death if necessary. The last Japanese soldier surrendered in 1974.
 
Yes it was necessary. As others have noted it took the bombs to jar the Emperor and the ruling council to finally decide to surrender.
 
Yet strategic bombing did far more damage than the atomic bombs. But that did not work? It makes no sense. The only reason those two cities were spared strategic bombing was to increase the impact the atomic bombs had on the cities.
 
rjh01 said:
Yet strategic bombing did far more damage than the atomic bombs. But that did not work? It makes no sense. The only reason those two cities were spared strategic bombing was to increase the impact the atomic bombs had on the cities.
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As Dr. Sid points out, that was the psychological effect: just a single bomb, and poof, whole city gone. The strategic bombing campaign still needed a whole armada of bombers to incinerate a city (though that worked much better in Japan than in Germany, what with all their paper houses).
 
theprestige said:
Yet another reason why it was necessary to nuke Japan. The suffering of the Japanese people would have been much worse, and endured far longer, if they had submitted to Stalin.
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Add to that the eagerness of the Soviet to settle scores over the Russo-Japanese war.
 
abaddon said:
I think you wildly underestimate the will of the Japanese to fight on to the death if necessary. The last Japanese soldier surrendered in 1974.
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Your reading comprehension sucks today. I don't agree with the OP, I never said I did.

I said that you were making a straw man out of the OP's argument. Pointing out the error in your argument does not mean that I agree with the OP, because I don't.
 
Any way you slice it, no amount of claims by some generals that the war was going to end or that they didn't want to use the bomb or that the Russians might invade, will affect three key facts about this issue...

1. The Japanese War cabinet was deadlocked; they were NOT going to surrender.

2. It took the personal intervention of Emperor Hirohito to change the minds of the members of the War Cabinet. That intervention only came after the Nagasaki bomb.

3. In his surrender speech, Hirohito made it clear that the bombs were the key reason for the surrender.

While you could argue, quite correctly, that strategic bombing had never lead to collapse of morale, the fact is that Hirohito understood that his country faced annihilation. The psychological idea that the enemy could simply wipe every city in Japan off the map, one by one and with absolute impunity, would have been a terrifying prospect.
 
crescent said:
Your reading comprehension sucks today. I don't agree with the OP, I never said I did.
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I never claimed you did.

crescent said:
I said that you were making a straw man out of the OP's argument. Pointing out the error in your argument does not mean that I agree with the OP, because I don't.
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I simply presented a reasoned reply. Why did you avoid the point that the last Japanese soldier surrendered in December, 1974? Yes, you read that right December, 1974 almost 30 years after the war actually ended. In fact there were two that year, and previously, in 1972. The Japanese will to fight on at any cost cannot be underestimated. Somehow, it amuses you to pretend that such never happened. I can name them, would that help? OK then. Nakamura Teruo, Hiroo Onada, Shoichi Yokoi.

Hiroo Onada died in 2014, within living memory. He even has an autobiography.

So, no. I do not accept that Japan would have surrendered without massive loss of life on both sides. The commitment to kamikaze attacks and such like are bad enough, but to waste a further thirty years fighting a lost war for no reason is a demonstration in itself.
 
abaddon said:
I never claimed you did.

I simply presented a reasoned reply. Why did you avoid the point that the last Japanese soldier surrendered in December, 1974? Yes, you read that right December, 1974 almost 30 years after the war actually ended. In fact there were two that year, and previously, in 1972. The Japanese will to fight on at any cost cannot be underestimated. Somehow, it amuses you to pretend that such never happened. I can name them, would that help? OK then. Nakamura Teruo, Hiroo Onada, Shoichi Yokoi.

Hiroo Onada died in 2014, within living memory. He even has an autobiography.

So, no. I do not accept that Japan would have surrendered without massive loss of life on both sides. The commitment to kamikaze attacks and such like are bad enough, but to waste a further thirty years fighting a lost war for no reason is a demonstration in itself.
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:thumbsup:
 
bobtaftfan said:
In The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth, Gar Alperovitz, a former research fellow at Harvard and King's College and a research scientist at the University of Maryland, makes a powerful case that the U.S. did not need to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki and that Truman and other senior officials knew that the Japanese were prepared to surrender weeks before Hiroshima.

Come to find out that many, many U.S. military leaders, including Eisenhower, felt that we should not have nuked the Japanese and that there was no valid military reason for doing so.

We knew from intelligence intercepts of Japanese communications that the Japanese would surrender and meet all of our demands if we would merely assure them that the emperor would not be molested.

It's hard to feel sorry for the Japanese, given the vicious way their army conducted itself in so many cases. But one set of war crimes does not justify another.

Defenders of Truman's action have long claimed that if we had not nuked Japan, hundreds of thousands of casualties would have been suffered in a land invasion. But this is a false choice. As many military experts pointed out at the time, no invasion would have been necessary if the naval and air blockade had simply been allowed to continue to strangle Japan for a few more months, even assuming the Japanese were not ready to surrender by June 1945 (which they were).

Here are some online articles on this tragic episode in American history:

http://www.colorado.edu/AmStudies/lewis/2010/atomicdec.htm

http://www.doug-long.com/summaryc.htm

https://mises.org/library/hiroshima-myth

https://www.thenation.com/article/why-the-us-really-bombed-hiroshima/
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Not this **** again?
 
abaddon said:
Why did you avoid the point that the last Japanese soldier surrendered in December, 1974? Yes, you read that right December, 1974 almost 30 years after the war actually ended. In fact there were two that year, and previously, in 1972. The Japanese will to fight on at any cost cannot be underestimated. Somehow, it amuses you to pretend that such never happened. I can name them, would that help? OK then. Nakamura Teruo, Hiroo Onada, Shoichi Yokoi.

Hiroo Onada died in 2014, within living memory. He even has an autobiography.

So, no. I do not accept that Japan would have surrendered without massive loss of life on both sides. The commitment to kamikaze attacks and such like are bad enough, but to waste a further thirty years fighting a lost war for no reason is a demonstration in itself.
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I think we might be in violent agreement, because otherwise your posts bear no relation to mine.

I agree that the Japanese government would not have surrendered without the use of the atomic bombs, at least not for a long time and after even greater bloodshed. I never stated otherwise.

ETA: I did propose a hypothetical scenario, but I never made any implications as the likelihood of that scenario being plausible. It was only intended to demonstrate that even in the most rose-tinted-glasses type scenario of what could have happened if the nukes were not used, the death toll might still have been higher than what actually happened. I made no claim that the scenario I laid out was even remotely plausible.
 
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