Political Crossfire Forums

we dropped the atomic bomb on nagasaki

70 years later do you think it was the right thing to do? Do you think we could have won the war and avoided dropping the bomb?

well operation downfall would have, without question, caused millions of deaths. the casualty rate for the first hours/day of the invasion was expected to be 100%. not only that, but had we gone through with that we would have ended up with a situation similar to east-west germany in japan because the soviets were part of the planned invasion. on top of that, the absolutely monstrous death toll it would have caused would have completely ruined japanese society and culture and the penalties we levied against japan would still be felt today.

plus there's no a whole lot of indication they intended to surrender before hiroshima. i think the better question is if nagasaki was necessary. it's pretty controversial because there was indication they were planning to surrender after hiroshima happened.

The question is, if it wasn't used would atomic weapons never be used?

they would have surrendered eventually. the russians declared war and decimated the japanese army in manchuria. still, the americans unbelievable firepower hitting them on one end, and the endless supply of russian lives on the other, they knew the gig was up in that instant. and so they picked the americans to surrender to. good choice, now they got baseball and tentacle porn. still they held out for 5 days after the soviet declaration of war and nagasaki before announcing intention, and still didn't until sept 2 (they didn't actually end the war with soviets until 1956, technically, but the US occupied japan during that time anyway)

but comrade is right. the death toll would have been monstrous had an invasion taken place. could they have hoped to hold out for better terms? yeah, many wanted to. but the destructive power of one bomb was so great, they gave in. and we didn't have more bombs ready, we were gearing up for invasion. comrade is also right they didn't intend to surrender before hiroshima. they rejected postdam declaration days before. but about nagasaki... the japs were looking into the bomb themselves. they thought it was difficult. so difficult the americans couldn't possibly have two. the americans knew thats what they'd be thinking; nagasaki was necessary

Wasn't necessary. Could have let the soviets finish them off for us.

Its not so much a question of should it have been used. More of a question of could it not have been used, considering the politics and the times?

This was the end of nearly a decade of continuous, unprecedented warfare across the planet. 60 million people were dead. Japan was down by about 3 million by themselves. The conventional bombing of Japan had been shockingly deadly...Tokyo alone was a 6 figure mortality figure most famously, to say nothing of injuries and homelessness in the aftermath. But there was also the similarly effective firebombings across most other major Japanese cities to consider. Altogether, the bombing campaign on Japan could have resulted in as many as a million deaths.

Standing back and looking at it from this perspective, the atomic bombs were really a sideshow. The difference, of course, is flashiness. Nuclear weapons were new and mysterious. There was a lot of really bad science being used by people trying to actually communicate what nuclear weapons even were to the world. Even Truman's message to the Japanese got it wrong. But now there was this new, futuristic, thing that was instantly distinctive from the carpet bombings (and images of of the aftermaths thereof that the world was now totally desensitized to) A flash. A giant mushroom cloud. Massive destruction from a single plane and a single bomb. Catchy new words like "atomic" and "nuclear".

Who could be blamed for forgetting that the conventional warfare they'd been living and bending their total productivity towards was FAR more deadly? Add in half a century of Cold War hysteria and paranoia and nuclear weapons now carry such an amazing stigma that we are more than willing to engage in outright revisionism in an effort to find some way of applying our current, 21st century understanding of and terror for the situation to a bunch of people in 1945 coming out history's worst conflict who simply didn't have any concept of the power they were playing with. There were used to employing boom. Now they had *BOOM* to work with. To them it was a measure of magnitude, not of any sort of fundamental change in meaning. Nuclear weapons hadn't been burned into our collective consciousness by the Cold War. We hadn't applied our own philosophies and ontological projections onto them yet.

In 1945 it was a bunch of stereotypical, cigar-chewing old soldiers with a bigger firecracker. Not everyone was equally poetic:
Oppenheimer: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."
Leslie Groves: "Holy shit! Bro, did you see that?!"

After the amazing scale of the project, the ongoing contributions (and expectations) of allied partners, and the tremendous cost...there was simply no way this was going to stop with a beta test. Everyone was constantly hungry for new weapons, and something that could jolt the Japanese out of their near-religious fanatic level of resistance would have been politically suicidal if left off the table, resulting in the deaths of additional millions...to say nothing of the certainty that the Russians wouldn't hesitate to use theirs. The development of nuclear science was a mathematical eventuality, after all.

Also, consider the gusto with which Europe integrated nuclear weaponry into their domestic defense strategies in the post war. It took decades before NATO was willing to even to accept Flexible Response. Prior, "First Use" was retained as doctrine against even a limited conventional attack by the USSR. Even Eisenhower had already abandoned the policy of massive nuclear retaliation. They signed into Article 5 in 1949, long before the USSR had even tested a weapon of their own...of course it was implicit that US weapons would be stationed on their side of the pond going forward. It wasn't until the 80's that European NATO members finally abandoned the integration of tactical nukes, including nuclear artillery shells, landmines, short range missiles and even nuclear dumb bombs into their defense doctrines. And these were the people who would be caught in the crossfire, and were still rebuilding from the last war!

So...considering how very different the view was on nuclear weapons even deep into the Cold War, I've always been more than a little impatient with applying our modern viewpoints (and perfect hindsight) to the 1940's...which was still operating at the level of Total War, as opposed to the 4G warfare political police actions we and our parents generations would learn to recognize as war. We just aren't capable of seeing the world through their eyes. Everything is just so fundamentally different. Our attitudes towards war and the use of weapons...radically different.