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I always wonder why the second nuclear bomb in particular isn't much more prevalent in the Zeitgeist as the atrocity that it was.
The first bomb is somewhat understandable, still you could argue that the US might have figured out a way to demonstrate its destructive power to the Japanese without killing over 100,000 mostly innocent people in an instant. Maybe at the trade-off of temporarily risking US soldier lifes and resources of the general public. Still, you can argue the other way and see it as a terrible conclusion to a terrible war.
But the second one? I've seen many docs and historians perspectives on why it was considered necessary, but I can't find the point of view from which it was anything but a total atrocity for which the people who made it happen should be remembered in shame forever. So much of Japan not immediately surrendering after the first bomb dropped was down to the fog of war, to simple and understandable slow speed in government decisionmaking, etc.
Even if you can't be sure that the first bomb would have been enough to have them surrender, just the chance of it should have been enough to pick a different strategy, at the chance of saving a couple of dozen thousand innocent lives.
> I always wonder why the second nuclear bomb in particular isn't much more prevalent in the Zeitgeist as the atrocity that it was.
I think the simple answer is that before the scale of Hiroshima was really understood, everyone though of it as mostly just a more efficient way to perform the atrocity that they were already doing. On this point check out Wellersteins earlier text on the 67:th anniversary: http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/08/06/hiroshima-at-67-th...
> mostly just a more efficient way to perform the atrocity that they were already doing.
Yes. These nuclear weapons were a more efficient way of obliterating a city through fire: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_194...
It turns out that if you drop thousands of tons of incendiaries on a city made from wood and paper, you can kill a really large number of people at once.
We can re-litigate these questions, but I'm not sure we'll reach any answers. A more salient one is "how can we prevent this from ever happening again?" including "how can we prevent states from launching wars of aggression?"
It's worth pointing out that the conventional bombing raid of Tokyo on March 9, 1945 was deadlier than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki, depending on whose counts you use...
Their expectation was that if they tried to invade Japan there would be way more casualties on both sides than were killed at Nagasaki [1].
I think you may be underestimating the scope of WWII in the Pacific. The battles to retake islands had often been extremely bloody. The battle for Okinawa for example cost 14k Allied soldiers and 77k Japanese soldiers, and well over 100k civilians. I don't think any other island came close in total numbers, but only because they didn't have high populations.
Any reasonable extrapolation of those invasions to an invasion of mainland Japan would have far more civilian deaths than using both atomic bombs, even if you projected lower casualty rates than there had been in the island campaigns.
A blockade instead of an invasion might have worked, but that too would likely have a very large number of civilian casualties. Blockades work by either making it so bad that the civilians rise up and force a change in policy, or so many civilians die that the government runs out of people to draft into the army. The last to actually personally feel the effects of a blockade are the people in power.
Even after the second bomb there were highly placed military offices who were so determined to continue the war that they attempted a coup to stop the Emperor from surrendering [2].
I mean they didn't surrender for 6 days after Nagasaki. Clearly not in any rush and if you read about the details, there was quite an internal struggle within the Japanese government whether to accept surrender or fight on.
And even if we accept that "Japan was beaten". What the next move? A naval blockade? Starve Japan into submission?
How many tens of thousands of civilian deaths due to famine would make the leadership break? Would that have been better than tens of thousands of civilian deaths due to nuclear bombs?
Firebombing cities was a thing. There is little difference in firebombing Tokyo with 200 planes and dropping one "special" bomb.
Second bomb (Nagasaki) was not authorized in some special way. Air force had two bombs available and planned to drop them a week apart. Due to weather it ended up being 3 days. After Nagasaki Truman ordered them to need explicit approval of the president to drop future bombs (appalled at civilian deaths).
You're looking at it with the deeply ingrained belief that nuclear bombs are a uniquely horrifying thing, something that should automatically warrant special consideration, and where merely threatening its use was obviously something no enemy could ignore.
The people who made the decisions back then did not have, could not have that belief. They had been fighting a brutal war for years, and it was just a bomb. A bigger, more powerful bomb that they hoped would help win the war, but without the hindsight that informs your view, it would not at all have been obvious to them that this bomb could end the war all by itself. Because a weapon that could force a surrender merely through a demonstration of its power had never before existed.
The point of view you can't find is simply this: "We have to hit them what everything we have, as hard as possible, as quickly as possible, until they can't fight back anymore, because that's the only thing that's worked so far."
Moreover, that was generally a time of war i.e. dying in a war was normal. Nobody under age ~60 can directly relate.
I mean... it was a time, when even the americans used concentration camps in US to lock up the japanese, and people didn't mind. The war lasted long enough, that the propaganda machine did it's job and noone (inside usa, and many other countries) really cared about 'a few' japanese lives, even if "a few" means tens of thousands... some even rooted for more.
Plenty of people minded in the US, including the first lady. And in modern times it's considered a shameful black mark on FDR's presidency.
The onus was on Japan to surrender immediately, not for the US to be patient. You don’t punch your aggressor once and wait to see what he’s going to do next. You beat him with overwhelming force until he’s incapacitated or he waves the white flag.
This isn't simply "your aggressor" this is hundreds of thousands of people, mostly civilians like this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_a...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Holocaust
The war needed to end immediately.
While i understand the rationale, ive come to question if "fighting fire with napalm" is such a good idea, from ethics perspective.
Is it not a duty to not fall prey to indulge in mass killing even if it may seem justified by the barbarity of the opposing side?
Nuking Nagasaki wouldn't do much to stop the holocaust. The Germans were already three months defeated at that point.
They were ready for a conditional surrender before even the first bomb was dropped; the bombs facilitated an unconditional surrender.
At the end of the day, they seem to have had more to do with letting the Soviets know the time of day more than anything pertaining to Japan. The whole event is a reminder of why having a figurehead president with all the real decisions made by military leadership is rarely a good way to run the country.
>At the end of the day, they seem to have had more to do with letting the Soviets know the time of day more than anything pertaining to Japan.
This is a very popular historical revisionist argument which seems to have little if any credible evidence to back it up[0]. It's just something that feels true to people when they consider the evil of the American military industrial complex, can't accept any Western historical narrative at face value, and require a conspiracy behind everything.
But what documentary evidence does exist, as far as I can tell, supports the status quo version of events[1].
[0] https://www.bu.edu/historic/hs/kort.html
[1] https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Event...
In fairness, neither bomb caused Japan to surrender, it was the USSR's entry into the war that triggered that.
In the second world war the japanese acted unequivocally as absolute monsters. It is not an atrocity that they were nuked and it is not an atrocity that they were nuked twice. If anything, it should have happened far earlier.
I'd phrase it differently, but I think it's basically what happened.
Japanese atrocities against civilians in China and Korea were enormous. Japanese treatment of US PoWs was horrendous. Japanese troops continued to fight literally to the last man, just to try and kill as many Americans as they could. I think when fighting an all-out war against an opponent like this, it's hard to self-limit.
Further, the Japanese approach of never surrendering produced some gargantuan casualties. The Battle of Iwo Jima [1] was apparently the turning point in American thinking. After breaking the back of Japanese Imperial Fleet, Americans figured they need to start taking territory, which meant mostly invading islands. Iwo Jima had notable, but not extreme importance. And again, the Japanese would just not surrender. Quoting Wikipedia, of the 21,000 Japanese troops, only 216 were taken prisoner, and these were mostly unconscious or disabled soldiers who could physically not fight. The rest fought tooth, nail and bayonet against each and every American, and died eventually.
Add 6k American soldiers who died in that one battle, and suddenly dropping an extra nuke on a city of 100,000 looks, weirdly, like a life-saving manoeuvre. And Iwo Jima wasn't even that important, or particularly close to Japan proper, you could expect casualties to only get significantly worse. This doesn't even count the wounded, which in a military context doesn't usually mean a bloody nose.
> acted unequivocally as absolute monsters
I'll never forget the day a friend told me: "the Japanese were absolutely ruthless. I mean, these guys made the _nazis_ say 'what the hell is wrong with the Japanese?'"
Which led me to read about this man:
> It is not an atrocity that they were nuked and it is not an atrocity that they were nuked twice
Yeah, the civilians and especially the children should've overthrown the government. They were totally asking to get nuked.
Using nukes may have been the least-bad long term option. That doesn't change that it was an atrocity.
In an alternate ending, Japan would not have surrendered, and, like in Berlin, fought till the end. Every large city would have been bombed, one after another. Only the military would have been far enough from cities to live.
I can add something relevant to this bit:
One wonders, of course, why anyone would think the Japanese would think the atomic bomb was a one-off thing, or that the Americans wouldn't have the resolve to use it again.
When I was a student studying the Japanese side of WW2, one of my histories quoted a memo to the Japanese high command arguing that since producing nuclear weapons was such an expensive and lengthy process, it was almost certain that the USA had only two bombs and that their threat to continue with them was a bluff.
It was not unreasonable for the Americans to expect the Japanese to be skeptical.
Down in the comments section, the author makes this point:
One of the very best points that Hasegawa makes in his work is that there is no single "Japanese" or "American" policy opinion -- because both governments involved rather complicated balances of power within their cabinets.
Something usually ignored when discussing American decision making about the bomb is the actual state of their knowledge of Japanese thinking. We now have 70-odd years of studying Japanese documents and interviews with key Japanese and there is still nothing close to a consensus on how the Japanese would have reacted to different situations. Yet people criticize the American leadership for lacking that same insight into the mind of the enemy during the war.
I find the phrasing of the question annoying and left the article without having my curiosity satisfied.
The question phrased as "Why Nagasaki?" is actually "Why a second nuclear bomb?"
But why was it Nagasaki? The closest to an answer the article seems to give is "Because Kokura was clouded" or "Because they wanted to spare Kyoto", neither of which really satisfies why Nagasaki (or Kokura, or Hiroshima for that matter) made the list in the first place.
I largely only know of Hiroshima and Nagasaki because of the nuclear bombings. So why wasn't it Tokyo or Osaka?
Annoyingly, the author does this phrasing again when linking to a page that he purports answers the question "Why Hiroshima", but in facts discuss "Why throwing a nuclear bomb at all"
> So why wasn't it Tokyo or Osaka?
Presumably because of https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_1... and ... can't find the corresponding wikipedia page, but Osaka, Nagoya and Kobe were fire-bombed shortly after. The fire-bombing of Kobe is probably what wad depicted in the animation movie Grave of the fireflies.
This is not talked about much, but led to more deaths than both Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined...
Here's the list of why, but I doubt it'll make you any happier:
""" (1) they be important targets in a large urban area of more than three miles in diameter, (2) they be capable of being damaged effectively by a blast, and (3) they are unlikely to be attacked by next August.
Dr. Stearns had a list of five targets which the Air Force would be willing to reserve for our use unless unforeseen circumstances arise. """
http://www.dannen.com/decision/targets.html#d
The answer really does boil down to the USAF hadn't bombed it by the 10th of August and the more preferred target had bad weather.
IIRC the imperial palace in Tokyo was nuclear target #3 assuming Japan didnt surrender.
To the assumed question, it was a major port city and the home of Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. To the really obvious question the article asks, the second bomb shows you can do it again, and you're ready to do it some more. It's a "surrender today" kind of statement.
This article makes a solid case that not only did the US not need to drop the bomb in order to precipitate Japan's capitulation, but that it did so knowing that it's not necessary:
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-08-05/hiroshima-a...
Yup, else they might try to decide to wait it out and build their own bomb. They were so much against surrendering many committed seppuku or regular suicide when it happened and those were regular people.
It's very interesting how until recently I grew up and believed the bombings should not have happened. Modern ICBMs and hydrogen bombs are much more scary as is nuclear powers going to war but MAD aside there are situations where a single nuke at a strategic location will save many more lives on both sides of a conflict.but it still doesn't feel right saying it.
> It's a "surrender today" kind of statement
And Japan still didn’t.
I've been to the USAF Museum in Dayton, Ohio, where they have the B-29 that dropped the bomb on Nagasaki.
At first glance, it's just another plane in the museum. But if you actually let yourself think about it, it's somewhat more sobering: you're looking at the actual plane that actually flew and did it. It really brings home the reality of it. And it's a bit disturbing to think that a piece of machinery can end the lives of tens of thousands of people all at once, and that humans are even capable of building such things.
Anyway just thought I'd share my experience.
Kind of reminds me of 9/11 actually. The first plane hit and everyone was kind of in a stupor, but when that second plane hit the urgency of the situation comes into sharp focus
I've visited Nagasaki - it does seem like a poor choice - the city is a series of valleys - they shielded much of the city from the bomb. Ground zero was the largest Christian cathedral in the Far East, closest war related govt facility housed PoWs. Hiroshima in comparison is on a flat plain.
The reason is simple. If hypothetically speaking, someone had conducted a poll in the US in July '45 (after almost years of hard war in the Pacific) with the single question "are you ok with killing one million Japanese people to save one hundred thousand American boys?", I think the vast majority of the people would have answered yes.
America had just lost more than 20000 killed at Iwo Jima and Okinawa, and many more wounded. That's almost exactly the same number as those killed in the whole battle of Normandy (not just on D-day, but during the whole 3 month campaign). Iwo Jima was a tiny speck of land of less than 10 square miles, Okinawa is less than 500 sq miles. For comparison Normandy has an area of more than 10000 square miles. The Japanese were able to draw as much blood while surrendering 500 square miles as the Germans surrendering 20 times as much.
Oh, and the Japanese had the kamikazes.
I don't think the American's feared the Japanese by this time. After all, in all the battles the casualty ratio was between 1-to-3 and 1-to-10 US vs Japanese casualties. It was a given that they will crush Japan, and it had been so for 2 years already. But war is war, and people die in war. If there was something that could stop the war and save American lives, then Americans wanted it.
The alternative to a land invasion was total psychological shock. A few hours after Hiroshima Truman gave his "rain of ruin" speach [1]. He implied that America will drop numerous atomic bombs over Japan (if you pay attention he never says that directly, but it's easy to think he does)
We are now prepared to obliterate more rapidly and completely every productive enterprise the Japanese have above ground in any city. We shall destroy their docks, their factories, and their communications. Let there be no mistake; we shall completely destroy Japan's power to make war.
It was to spare the Japanese people from utter destruction that the ultimatum of July 26 was issued at Potsdam. Their leaders promptly rejected that ultimatum. If they do not now accept our terms they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth. Behind this air attack will follow sea and land forces in such numbers and power as they have not yet seen and with the fighting skill of which they are already well aware.
[1] https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeche...
Sadly, the answer has nothing to do with Japan and everything to do with the Soviet Union:
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/2020-08-05/hiroshima-a...
Contrarian counterfactual myth
Waste of time. The article is long and doesn't answer the question.
Why?
There is Urakami cathedral. Render unto Caesar.