There are a number of reasons why I’m fairly certain that I have ADHD, but one of them is that it is very easy for me to lose track of time, both over the course of a day, and from one week or month to the next. This is made worse by the fact that I’m currently entirely self-employed, and I don’t have money to go out and do things, so my days all look pretty similar. That that means is that I’m now posting a video that I had meant to post six days ago.
On August 6th, 1945, the United States dropped an atomic bomb the Japanese city of Hiroshima. Three days later, it did the same to the city of Nagasaki. The casualties are estimated at around two hundred thousand people, but it’s hard to know for sure, because of the scale of destruction. The vast majority of those killed were civilians.
The story I heard most, growing up, was that this was done avoid a costly and bloody land invasion, but as I’ve learned more, I’ve come to believe that while invasion plans may have existed, just as the Pentagon doubtless has “invasion plans” for most countries on the planet, but I don’t believe they had an intention to invade, because they didn’t need to. Even if surrender wasn’t on the table, Japan had no ability to fight in any meaningful way, and no ability at all to project power outside its shores. All the Allies had to do was maintain a blockade, and do conventional bombing runs. There was no reason to invade.
Further, the Allies were listening in on all of Japan’s communications, knew that they were trying to get the USSR to negotiate a surrender, with their biggest sticking point being the life and safety of Emperor Hirohito – a condition the Allies were entirely fine with, outside of propaganda concerns back home. No, the reason the bombs were dropped had very little to do with the people killed and injured by them. It was done primarily as a display of power, directed primarily at the Soviet Union, and I think that Shaun’s video, below, does an excellent job of laying out the case for that. It’s a long video, but well worth your time.
Most of my formal education about the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki happened still behind the Iron Curtain and it painted the USA as an unequivocal villain. In fact, we were first taught about these, and only much later did we learn that Japan was allied with Nazi Germany in WW2. And even though I later learned that the USA was not the unequivocal villain in the conflict with Japan and that, in fact, imperial Japan was a genocidal force on par with Nazi Germany, I still never learned anything that would justify these bombings. They were unnecessary massacres with the sole purpose of terrorizing the world.
I do not think I have ADHD but I might have mild Asperger’s. Hard to say at my age, I would have to pay for a diagnosis and to travel not a trivial length of time to specialists for no tangible gain so I will remain uncertain and undiagnosed and weird.
I’m in the same boat right now, on diagnosis. Can’t afford private options, and there’s literally nobody doing adult screening in my catchment area in the public system. That *might* change soon, but I have no idea how long that wait might be.
I just want to find out if meds might help. At least I’m getting better at coping, under current conditions.
And yeah, no excuses for the crimes of the Japanese empire, and I’m glad the Allies won. The atom bombs were something else, and most of the people they killed had no say in or knowledge of their government’s actions.
I wish more people knew about these facts; there was a hard 0% chance that the Japanese mainland was going to be invaded by the Allies, atomic bombs or not. The Japanese were known by all to have been within weeks or a month of surrendering, and it’s an indisputable fact known to anyone who’s actually studied the subject. Even well-educated buy into this insane lie that there was some kind of imminent invasion plan and that the bombs were “necessary to end the war and save American lives.” They were absolutely not needed, and never in my life have I experienced any other topic in which level-headed and logical people are so vehemently wrong. It is all recorded by well-regarded academics and historians. The bombs were dropped only to sate Truman’s vengeful bloodlust and to threaten the Russians at the start of the obviously imminent cold war. Truman’s entire cabinet, including the secretary of war, told him it was insane and unnecessary to end the war, but he did it anyway.
I urge everyone to learn the facts, and never again insist that such measures were necessary. This is the most pervasive and blatant lie in modern history, and it needs to be dismantled.
WW2 was as brutal as it can get. Industrialized murder. Total war economies.
Strategic bombing. Dresden. Atomic bombs.
I can’t dispute that it was everything you say it was, but it wasn’t just what you say it was. Whether it was actually a needless act can’t really be settled after the fact. A symptom of the times.
Notably, never again have atomic weapons been used in anger.
It changed the world, that’s for sure. MAD.
Sorry, but I’m not persuaded of that. You could make the same claim about almost everything in the past, could you not? I’ve heard “sure, there were downsides, but it had to happen” about genocides, slavery, and pretty much every war the US has been in since WW2.
My understanding of the Cold War, and anti-communism leading up to it, was that there was an intense fear, among capitalists, that communism would spread from nation to nation, and so they had to back Pinochet, and invade Vietnam, and embargo Cuba, and they just had to murder all the communists in Indonesia.
Whose definition of “need” are we working with here? Sure, if you think the Cold War was an obvious net good, then you could argue that the bombs were also necessary as part of fighting the Red Menace or whatever, but it seems pretty cut-and-dried that the bombs were needless when it came to beating Japan, because they were already beaten, they knew that, and the US knew that they knew that.
The story I heard most, growing up, was that this was done avoid a costly and bloody land invasion
The Japanese expected a continuation of the “island hopping” campaign, ending in a sea/land invasion of Japan, aiming toward Tokyo. So, they had substantial military forces in the Kanto plain which such landings would have to clear. In other words, there were massive, visible, military targets which went ignored in the US’ rush to use its nuclear weapons on civilian targets.
The US invasion plan (Op Downfall and Coronet) [wik] would have been profligate in terms of human life, but the time-lines for those operations were strongly influenced by the US’ desire to get Japan out of the war before the red army was finished mopping up Manchuria and began bearing down on Korea and the Japanese homeland. That false urgency would have resulted in many many deaths including hundreds of thousands of allied soldiers. In other words the logic “we had to do it because an invasion would have been too horrible” embeds some assumptions that more or less refute it.
We must also consider the wisdom/moral question of the allies’ demand for “unconditional surrender” – basically, the attack on Japan was predicated on “we refuse to negotiate” which worked super well in WW1, leading to WWII.
Using nuclear weapons was necessary because we spent a huge amount of money making them and wanted to show Stalin a thing or two. That’s political necessity, not military, and in my opinion, it’s a pretty wimpy fig-leaf. Once the US had the bomb, they were going to use it on somebody in order to demonstrate the folly of disagreeing with the US.
Whether it was actually a needless act can’t really be settled after the fact.
That’s an odd thing to say. If after the fact isn’t the time to assess an act, when is? It’s what “history” is for – you dig up all the factors you can that bear on a problem, and use them to assemble an analysis, which is then challenged or amplified as more facts are uncovered. Eventually there is a historical consensus, AKA “the judgement of history” (or at least historians).
There are some questions that are too big and vague (e.g.: “was Rome a good thing or not?”) but smaller events can be effectively analyzed and, yes, it’s reasonable to say such and such was “needless.”
Here’s an example: was Trump’s “trade war” with China needless? At a macro economic level, I think historians will agree that it was an expensive damp squib. Of course, someone can point out that it benefitted some specific company or other, therefore was “necessary” for that company. But that’s just reducing things to hair-splitting language that is more appropriately the domain of philosophy and not history.
“It saved American lives.”
Is there any atrocity that can’t be justified with that excuse?
If it justifies everything, it justifies nothing.
Marcus,
It’s a counterfactual; that is, it’s an assessment of what might have been, instead of what was. But sure, Japan was gonna be inevitably defeated, sooner or later.
As it turned out, Japan ended up overseen by the USA rather than the USSR, which was probably a significant turning point in history.
Clearly, after the fact, it’s evident that it was sufficient, whether or not it was needless. Sure, Japan could have surrendered to the USSR, or some other possibility. It might have been partitioned, like Germany. Or something else.
You’re read your share of alternate history, so I know you know what I mean.
Exactly. One of the very factors to which I refer.
Um, you’re kinda dissing historians there. I’m pretty sure hair-splitting is well within their purview.
The very OP is speculation that had the bomb not been dropped — at which point USSR declared war on Japan and attacked — the outcome upon its cessation would have been no worse, which renders the dropping of that first bomb unnecessary. Outcome for everyone, but particularly for the party with agency, that being the USA.
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PS
WW2 was as brutal as it can get. No compromise.
And, well, you’re USAnian yourself.
You remember the sentiment after 9/11, right? I do.
Same thing, but in spades.
Japan was actively asking the USSR to mediate a surrender, under the mistaken belief that the USSR was holding to their non-aggression pact. Stalin was stalling rather than telling them no, only because he was about to invade Japanese-controlled Manchuria. The only real condition for the rulers of Japan was the safety of the emperor, and – crucially – the United States knew all of this.
And the argument is not whether it was in the best interests of the United States to do it for larger geopolitical reasons, the argument is whether the nuclear bombs were necessary to get Japan’s surrender, and I think Shaun makes a very compelling case that they were not. Obviously it was necessary in the minds of the people who decided to do it, but nobody’s debating that, because doing so would be utterly pointless. The question is what the actual reasons were, and whether those reasons were in any way defensible. I do not believe they were.
First off, yes I remember that, and I was actively and vocally against it at the time. Second, for me, the only concern for the Allies was the appearance of an unconditional surrender, because they actively wanted the Japanese government and the Emperor to remain in charge, rather than having to set up a new government
Is this true? I thought that it was more “and the Emperor remains as the head of government”, which was the core religious tenant of their religious militaristic government, which IMHO means that maybe we should not have allowed the emperor to continue on as head of government.
I think Japan represents an example of regime change done right, and I am loathe to think what Japan might be today if we let the emperor stay in charge.
You’re basically suggesting that we should have left a genocidal Nazi-like regime in charge of Japan, with no accountability for their war criminals. I disagree. “Never again.”
PS: I think we can all agree that the second bomb was definitely unnecessary.