There appears to be 2 theories regards the nuclear bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima.

1. The bombing brought a swift end to the war, and limited the number of causalities likely to have occurred during a final assault on Japan.

2. The nuclear bombing was not the main reason why Japan surrendered. Due mainly to firebombing, Japan had lost many towns and cities, and the loss of 2 more cities was of little concern to the military. It was Russia entering into the Pacific conflict that was the main reason for the surrender, as the Japanese believed that Japan was going to be conquered eventually by both US and Russian forces, and Japan would then be annexed between the two, with minimal possibility of the country being reunited in the future.

However, the bombings that took place of all the cities and towns throughout Japan killed mostly civilian people (with estimates of nearly a million killed), although Japanese forces had killed many civilians in other countries, and had specifically bombed many civilian areas throughout the war.

Of importance in the longer term, has been the proliferation of nuclear weapons throughout the world.

Also somewhat prophetic were these words from Oppenheimer:-
"if you approach the problem and say, 'We know what is right and we would like to use the atomic bomb to persuade you to agree with us,' then you are in a very weak position and you will not succeed…. You will find yourselves attempting by force of arms to prevent a disaster."

Josh Ushay raises excellent points in a well constructed article. I however, can't understand why anybody could have the view, as some of the naive leftist ideologues have been known to express in their rabid pursuit of the US, that the dropping of the atomic bomb was in any way a negative event.

The simple fact is, although the Japanese don't have a problem with erasing such facts from their history books, they needed such a demonstration to pull them into line. People can argue for against it in a moral sense, but one can't act like Jesus Christ in a world full of immoral, savage cultures who would consume us in a second ever given the chance.

I seriously believe that the bomb was the best thing to happen to Japan, and you can take that any way you like. Japan has gone from being an aggressive, domineering & threatening to a world leader in sixty years!

Aren't those Americans awful! Their greatest enemy, who tried to conquer the pacific no less, yet they don't keep them on their knees (which is exactly where we'd be if Japan won), they help them up, build their economy, in which everybody wins. Japan still gets to have influence in the region in an economic sense, and the US wins through opening up the Japanes market, which is what the US wants of the entire world.

I sincerly hope that the Japanese lecture the Iraqi's on how the US is not their enemy, but their best chance at going foward, as it was for them all those years ago.

I think you raise some interesting points Benjamin

About 60 – 80 years ago, Japan was an aggressive country, and had viciously attacked China and other Asian countries as well as the US. However it now appears in time, that this level of aggression was a political type construct, and was not innate within the Japanese people.

There has been very little immigration into Japan, and if tests were undertaken, the DNA characteristics of the average Japanese person today would be no different than what they were prior to WW2. The gene pool is the same, but most of the Japanese people who fought in the war were reletatively uneducated, had little knowledge of the outside world, and many had never been outside of their own town or city until they were conscripted to fight in a war in another country.

So Japan attacking other countries was politically motivated by a relatively few people who were in power at the time, but through different forms of propaganda and indoctrination, they had convinced the general population of Japan that war with other countries was necessary. The general population was brainwashed into believing this and they were used as a political and military tool by a very few people who wanted to achieve more power for themselves.

Eventually, the general population of Japan suffered terribly because of this. Over 50 Japanese cities and major towns were destroyed by bombing prior to the first nuclear bombs being dropped on Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and the levels of depravation throughout the country was extreme, but the Emperor remained alive throughout and living a life of splendour.

So to me, the real lesson from Nagasaki and Hiroshima is that most people are born the same, but a whole population of people can be easily lead by a very few individuals who seek more power for themselves. The whole population can suffer terribly because of that.

As a famous person once said the dead can rest easy knowing that they were killed for a just cause using conventional weapons.

McCullough's biography of Truman suggests that the huge losses on both sides resulting from the invasion of Okinawa convinced him to try to avoid an invasion of the Japanese mainland, even at the cost of using the devastating atomic bombs. Remember too that most of the major Japanese cities had already been nearly destroyed by "conventional" bombs, with (in some cases) even larger civilian casualties than in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and still the regime in Japan did not surrender.

Early in Truman's presidency he seems to have underestimated the threat the Soviets would pose post-war. At the Potsdam Conference of July 1945 (where he received word of the successful first nuclear bomb test) Truman, unlike Churchill, thought Stalin could be negotiated with, and even thought he could establish a personal rapport with him. So the argument that the bombs were dropped on Japan to send a message to the Soviets does not seem to hold much water.

I think the debate over whether the use of atomic bombs against Japan was justified or not will rage on for a long time to come, and I personally think it will never be resolved.

The idea that there has been a "long-standing debate" about the use of the atomic bomb is a myth. People were generally relieved that the war was over and the bomb saved perhaps millions who would have died through conventional warfare. There has, though, been a recent anti-american push to raise the debate to the level of public consciousness and rewrite history to claim there has always been a debate about its use.

The truth is that regret about the necessity of its use has always been present but this is entirely different the claim that a realistic option was ignored.

Atman writes: "The idea that there has been a "long-standing debate" about the use of the atomic bomb is a myth. .... There has, though, been a recent anti-american push to raise the debate to the level of public consciousness and rewrite history to claim there has always been a debate about its use."

Atman has a point that the use of the atomic bomb has become popular as a retroactive rhetorical club with which to beat the USA. Commentators attempt to map their current resentments du jour (Iraq, Guantanamo Bay, Kyoto, you name it) onto US actions of 60 years ago. The argument goes something like: "How can you Americans talk about human rights, democracy, motherhood, and apple pie [or fill in your favorite unassailable virtue here]? You dropped THE BOMB on Hiroshima and Nagasaki!" The "sin" of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in this school of thought, can never be washed from America's hands, and taints whatever the US has done from then on.

I think this is a specious line of argument. The circumstances were very different at the end of WWII than the world situation today. I think there's little analogy between the atom bomb attacks of 1945 and US actions on the world stage in 2005, whether you think the US was right or wrong, then or now.

However there was debate, even at the time, about the morality of using nuclear weapons. Some of the Manhattan Project scientists felt the project should be stopped once it was clear the Nazis had not succeeded in developing a nuclear bomb. Others thought a bomb should be dropped on a remote island as a warning to the Japanese. Even within the US military there was opposition to the use of so devastating a weapon (among the few leaders who knew it existed). And in the immediate aftermath some commentators felt it had been wrong to drop atomic bombs on mainly civilian targets (not that there was much left in Japan of military value by August 1945).

...and yet, the Japanese had had enough and were seeking terms. Their ability to engage allied air & naval forces had been reduced to 'bugger all'. Their military industrial complex was crumbling. Where was the imperative? Was Truman concerned for the starving Japanese civilians? Smile. Where was he in the American electoral cycle?

Truman did have an ideological distaste for a joint invasion with the Soviets. Yet, the Soviets were extremely unlikely to invade on their own, the logistics (maritime) alone was beyond them. They needed US shipping to invade. Surely this gave Truman time to stall, time to turn the screws, time to let allow the Japanese to come around to the realisation that they must surrender?

For me. It seems that Truman 'nuked' Japan because it suited his agenda. Sure, there were many concerns for him to balance (you summarise these well) and a mushroom cloud was an option he had to consider. I just wish he'd given a little more weight to human cost.

It’s a false dichotomy to say it ‘had to be done’, because otherwise 300, 000k Allied troops would die. There were other options. Truman’s administration was aware of this then and its clear to all now.

There was no immediate imperative to use nuclear weapons. The war was won. So if the bomb was dropped for ideological reasons, should we be surprised if some (not I, on balance) draw the similarity between terrorist killing for ideology and Truman doing the same?

Is it morally better to kill with clinical precision and the absence of ‘personnel’ violence? Next time a world leader is weighing up their options, do we really only want them to count their own dead?

Smiling,

Trebor

P.S. (btw) Nice post.

P.P.S. – You didn’t mention China in your post. Do you think Soviet activities in China were a factor in the decision to nuke Japan?