Wtf is this garbage? So you think any country the US is at war with would be morally justified in bombing a US city because of the "willing support" of the civilians of the nation?
This argument is essentially "war crimes don't exist".
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On the 75th Anniversary of Hiroshima's bombing, do you think the force was justified and saved more lives without it?
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This argument is essentially "war crimes don't exist".
Those were low level officers, The Imperial Japanese High Command did not stage a coup against the emperor.
Did Nuclear Weapons Cause Japan to Surrender?
Ward Wilson, senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, explains that the Soviet declaration of war and not the Hiroshima nuclear bombing caused Japan to surrender at the end of World War II.
www.carnegiecouncil.org
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The Soviet Union's declaration of war, on the other hand, fundamentally altered the strategic situation. Adding another great power to the war created insoluble military problems for Japan's leaders. It might be possible to fight against one great power attacking from one direction, but anyone could see that Japan couldn't defend against two great powers attacking from two different directions at once.
The Soviet declaration of war was decisive; Hiroshima was not.
After Hiroshima, soldiers were still dug in in the beaches. They were still ready to fight. They wanted to fight. There was one fewer city behind them, but they had been losing cities all summer long, at the rate of one every other day, on average. Hiroshima was not a decisive military event. The Soviet entry into the war was.
And they said this. Japan's leaders identified the Soviet Union as the strategically decisive factor. In a meeting of the Supreme Council in June to discuss the war in general, policy, they said Soviet entry would determine the fate of the empire. Kawabe Toroshiro said, "The absolute maintenance of peace in our relations with the Soviet Union is one of the fundamental conditions for continuing the war."
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There's only one answer and it has to be "no."
Any justification for the past use of nuclear weapons is a preemptive justification for their future use.
Any justification for the past use of nuclear weapons is a preemptive justification for their future use.
There really wasn't anything else. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were specifically moved off of bombing rotations because of the nukes. Allies bombers had run so far down the list of tertiary targets most runs were just dropping bombs on rubble. Allied escort fighters had so little to do with no Japanese air resistance they were turned loose to strafe any targets they could find in the countryside. It really is hard to convey how defeated Imperial Japan was at that point.
Can you give an example of a 1945 Japanese military target worth bombing that wasn't in or near a city?
Are people really arguing for killing civilians in a country because the country is at war? What is wrong with you?
No capacity? Every time I hear someone underestimate the Soviet ability to mobilize I get astounded.
The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan. Stalin Did.
Have 70 years of nuclear policy been based on a lie?
foreignpolicy.com
Did Nuclear Weapons Cause Japan to Surrender?
Ward Wilson, senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, explains that the Soviet declaration of war and not the Hiroshima nuclear bombing caused Japan to surrender at the end of World War II.
www.carnegiecouncil.org
"The Soviet Union's declaration of war, on the other hand, fundamentally altered the strategic situation. Adding another great power to the war created insoluble military problems for Japan's leaders. It might be possible to fight against one great power attacking from one direction, but anyone could see that Japan couldn't defend against two great powers attacking from two different directions at once.
The Soviet declaration of war was decisive; Hiroshima was not.
After Hiroshima, soldiers were still dug in in the beaches. They were still ready to fight. They wanted to fight. There was one fewer city behind them, but they had been losing cities all summer long, at the rate of one every other day, on average. Hiroshima was not a decisive military event. The Soviet entry into the war was.
And they said this. Japan's leaders identified the Soviet Union as the strategically decisive factor. In a meeting of the Supreme Council in June to discuss the war in general, policy, they said Soviet entry would determine the fate of the empire. Kawabe Toroshiro said, "The absolute maintenance of peace in our relations with the Soviet Union is one of the fundamental conditions for continuing the war."
The bombs didn't affect Japan's view on the war at all, the Soviets did.
Everything you laid out here just makes it obvious how unnecessary dropping the bombs was
This... isn't entirely accurate. A big problem in the negotiations pre-bombing was that the Soviets pushed for unconditional surrender early, and that was the mood of all negotiations going forward. Hell, Japan even tried to negotiate with the Soviet Union on the side, but they continued to push for an unconditional surrender (pretty much stalling as they moved their forces into the East).
Most of Japan's higher ups were adamantly opposed to an unconditional surrender despite their profound military disadvantage at that point.
Now if the Soviet Union declared war before the bombings, yeah, Japan probably would have folded to an unconditional surrender at that point, as they didn't want to fight a war on two fronts with a devastated navy. From the US/Britain perspective, they had some worries that the Soviet Union would try to occupy more land, including Japan. Under that scenario, yeah, no atomic bombing, but who knows how history would play out if US and the Soviets used Japan as a proxy divided region.
So no, Japan by all indications and info were not about to surrender, at least based on the historian stuff I've read over the years. We kinda have the benefit of knowing how the remaining 80 years plays out, at the time, they did not.
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It seems problematic to suggest that because factions of the military were willing to coup to prevent a surrender when they were opposed by other factions in the military! And then draw from that insinuation that this thinking was monolithic across mainland Japan.
The entire Pacific Theater post-1942 was unnecessary, yet here we are.
So you have a planned amphibious invasion that was to be larger than Normandy, require the entire Pacific fleet of the largest Navy on Earth, and would take the largest economy on earth several months to prepare for, and meanwhile the USSR would just walk in? After a week of fighting what the US had been doing for over 3 years? On what boats, fishing trawlers?No capacity? Every time I hear someone underestimate the Soviet ability to mobilize I get astounded.
The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan. Stalin Did.
Have 70 years of nuclear policy been based on a lie?
Did Nuclear Weapons Cause Japan to Surrender?
Ward Wilson, senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, explains that the Soviet declaration of war and not the Hiroshima nuclear bombing caused Japan to surrender at the end of World War II.
"The Soviet Union's declaration of war, on the other hand, fundamentally altered the strategic situation. Adding another great power to the war created insoluble military problems for Japan's leaders. It might be possible to fight against one great power attacking from one direction, but anyone could see that Japan couldn't defend against two great powers attacking from two different directions at once.
The Soviet declaration of war was decisive; Hiroshima was not.
After Hiroshima, soldiers were still dug in in the beaches. They were still ready to fight. They wanted to fight. There was one fewer city behind them, but they had been losing cities all summer long, at the rate of one every other day, on average. Hiroshima was not a decisive military event. The Soviet entry into the war was.
And they said this. Japan's leaders identified the Soviet Union as the strategically decisive factor. In a meeting of the Supreme Council in June to discuss the war in general, policy, they said Soviet entry would determine the fate of the empire. Kawabe Toroshiro said, "The absolute maintenance of peace in our relations with the Soviet Union is one of the fundamental conditions for continuing the war."
The bombs didn't affect Japan's view on the war at all, the Soviets did.
The Soviets lost like a thousand people out of a 15000-man force doing a landing at some remote islands after the war was over, against an enemy that had already surrendered. The idea of over 1 million men puttering across the Sea of Japan on a couple dozen patrol frigates, IS-2s lashed to the decks of minesweepers just demonstrates to me you really don't know what you're talking about. It was plainly obvious to everybody at the time that the Soviets had no capacity to attack Japan.
Sorry, I don't mean to sound like a dick. But you're here like "You underestimate the Soviets!!!" like they were going to climb on each other like ants and form a living bridge to Japan.
I always wondered why they didn't drop the first bomb just off the coast. You would have had most likely killed quite a few people with the ocean surge, still horrible....however, I feel like it would have gotten the point across without a direct hit.
If you had to drop 2, you could have done both without a direct hit, and then threatened to do a direct hit next (could have done the same after just one bomb).
In other words, my opinion is that the way it was done was completely unnecessary, let alone dropping one at all.
If you had to drop 2, you could have done both without a direct hit, and then threatened to do a direct hit next (could have done the same after just one bomb).
In other words, my opinion is that the way it was done was completely unnecessary, let alone dropping one at all.
If Japanese leadership was being rational. The issue is they weren't. They still wanted to maintain land holdings in mainland Asia, immunity against war crimes and to retain the crown. In in the face of total defeat they wanted to fight for leverage. Unconditional surrender was the only way forward and until the nukes IJ leadership was willing to bleed lives for leverage
The insinuations around this topic are blatantly racist, yeah.
They only had two bombs.
"We'll get you next time! Just give us four months, you'll see!"
Considering the mass suicides in Saipan and Okinawa, it really isn't.
Sooo, why even bother?
Drop the bombs on rubble, if you just need to showcase them.
Practically everyone got immunity against war crimes, plus there is significant scholarship suggesting that the Soviet declaration of war is what led to Imperial Japan's surrender. If Japan was already defeated before the atomic bombs (which you said yourself) and Soviet war declaration was inevitable regardless of the bombs, then that's your answer.
Regardless, there is no moral justification for vaporizing entire cities with hundreds of thousands of people in them. None.
I'm not suggesting Japan was a monolith. Quite the opposite, I'm highlighting that even after two bombing there was still a deep divide on whether to surrender. So it's no sure thing that they would have even before the bombings.
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The Japanese were defeated in 1942. The Nazis were defeated in 1943. The German Empire was defeated in 1914.
Just because they're defeated doesn't mean they're going to stop fighting. Or stop committing genocide, which people suspiciously always ignore in these discussions. I guess Koreans are just sub-human.
And this just demonstrates to me that you didn't even bother reading the articles posted and just started with the condescension.
And yet the Japanese Supreme council itself said the Soviet entry was the deciding factor in altering their view in regards to the continuation of the war.
So top generals with years of military experience thought the Soviets were a threat to them and forced them to surrender, and not the A bombs, I think I'll take their words.
Excerpt from Historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa essay on the matter
The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus
apjjf.org
" the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Soviet entry into the war—the Soviet invasion had a more important effect on Japan's decision to surrender; (3) nevertheless, neither the atomic bombs nor Soviet entry into the war served as "a knock-out punch" that had a direct, decisive, and immediate effect on Japan's decision to surrender; (4) the most important, immediate cause behind Japan's decision to surrender were the emperor's "sacred decision" to do so, engineered by a small group of the Japanese ruling elite; and (5) that in the calculations of this group, Soviet entry into the war provided a more powerful motivation than the atomic bombs to seek the termination of the war by accepting the terms specified in the Potsdam Proclamation. Further, by posing counterfactual hypotheses, I argue that Soviet entry into the war against Japan alone, without the atomic bombs, might have led to Japan's surrender before November 1, but that the atomic bombs alone, without Soviet entry into the war, would not have accomplished this. Finally, I argue that had U.S. President Harry Truman sought Stalin's signature on the Potsdam Proclamation, and had Truman included the promise of a constitutional monarchy in the Potsdam Proclamation, as Secretary of War Henry Stimson had originally suggested, the war might have ended sooner, possibly without the atomic bombs being dropped on Japan. "
It has been the consensus for years that the Soviet entry into the war was the deciding fact and not the A bombs.
Absolutely not. This is the military wanting to see the effectiveness of their research from the Manhattan project. They hide under the guise of heavy losses of an invasion but the war was a;ready won. Why invade at all? You can siege them and blockade any shipments comign in.
But like I mentioned in an earlier post, you're really banking on "conventional war wasn't enough to break japanese will, but nukes were". There's no genuine telling what the occupation of Japan would have looked like without the nukes, but I disagree with the position that the Japanese couldn't be compelled without nukes. Especially since this topic is about the moral justification and not simply military and political justification.
If the number of lives lost were the only metric in determining use-of-force in war, then we wouldn't have any concept of war crimes! Yet somehow thats the only justification used to defend the use of nukes.
Yes, and thats precisely why "we saved lives in the end" is an empty justification. It was an easier gamble for military and political purposes, but framing it as an impossibility is whitewashing the rationale behind the choices made, who made them, and how we retroactively look back on the use of the weapons.
Wtf is wrong with you? Who said that about Korean people here? You actually think the US gave even the slightest fuck about Japanese war crimes against Korean and Chinese people? Less than two decades later the US waltzed right into Korea to commit more war crimes. Furthermore, what did vaporizing hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians have to do with war crimes against the Koreans and Chinese?
I was always taught growing up how necessary it was, how my grandfather was sitting on a boat waiting to invade Japan in a move that would have likely killed millions of Japanese citizens.
As an adult, I concede that what I was told is likely bullshit just like everything else my parents/grandparents generations believed.
Ive heard it go both ways, they never would have surrendered, they were on the verge of surrendering. And the more I delve into US politics the more I lean towards the latter.
It was a move meant to show supremacy, dominance. Nothing more. It should be wholly condemned
As an adult, I concede that what I was told is likely bullshit just like everything else my parents/grandparents generations believed.
Ive heard it go both ways, they never would have surrendered, they were on the verge of surrendering. And the more I delve into US politics the more I lean towards the latter.
It was a move meant to show supremacy, dominance. Nothing more. It should be wholly condemned
Yes because the equation for the IJ leadership was to make the ground invasion so costly and traumatic for the invaders that the allies would give in to their demands for surrender. The nukes changed that calculus because with one bomb the allies wiped a city off the map. There was no path to resistance for Imperial leadership and with the threat of total annihilation (because they thought the US had a stockpile of nukes) the political leadership finally overtook the military leadership and accepted unconditional surrender.
Just one more war crime in the list of American war crimes from that war, but if it prevented a full invasion by the US and the Soviets it saved more lives. We can argue all day if that is the case or not, but that's one of those "what if Germany didn't invade Russia" or "what if Germany won the Battle of Britain" alternate history pissing matches that go nowhere, but can provide some entertainment depending on it not getting overheated.
With that said there were other ways, the US could have got Japan to surrender, ie promise not to remove the Emperor, that many make a strong argument could have done the same thing without annihilating two cities. It might have arguably saved lives, but the only way to accomplish that goal it was probably not. It was just the one that let the US see what all the resources they pumped into the bomb bought them.
With that said there were other ways, the US could have got Japan to surrender, ie promise not to remove the Emperor, that many make a strong argument could have done the same thing without annihilating two cities. It might have arguably saved lives, but the only way to accomplish that goal it was probably not. It was just the one that let the US see what all the resources they pumped into the bomb bought them.
This was always what I was taught when I was growing up. But I went to the Hiroshima War Memorial 3 years ago and it was really overwhelming and awful to see all the artifacts and evidence of the devastation. I saw the charred black, twisted remnants of a child's tricycle. And the outline of a human body burned into a slab of concrete from the heat. Nothing justifies this type of deadly force, especially against civilians.
They were willing to continue to fight despite the nukes.
The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus
apjjf.org
Did Nuclear Weapons Cause Japan to Surrender?
Ward Wilson, senior fellow at the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies, explains that the Soviet declaration of war and not the Hiroshima nuclear bombing caused Japan to surrender at the end of World War II.
www.carnegiecouncil.org
The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan. Stalin Did.
Have 70 years of nuclear policy been based on a lie?
foreignpolicy.com
Soviets declare war on Japan; invade Manchuria | August 8, 1945 | HISTORY
On August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union officially declares war on Japan, pouring more than 1 million Soviet soldiers into Japanese-occupied Manchuria, northeastern China, to take on the 700,000-strong Japanese army. The dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima by the Americans did not have the effect...
www.history.com
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The dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima by the Americans did not have the effect intended: unconditional surrender by Japan. Half of the Japanese inner Cabinet, called the Supreme War Direction Council, refused to surrender unless guarantees about Japan's future were given by the Allies, especially regarding the position of the emperor, Hirohito. The only Japanese civilians who even knew what happened at Hiroshima were either dead or suffering terribly.
Japan had not been too worried about the Soviet Union, so busy with the Germans on the Eastern front. The Japanese army went so far as to believe that they would not have to engage a Soviet attack until spring 1946. But the Soviets surprised them with their invasion of Manchuria, an assault so strong (of the 850 Japanese soldiers engaged at Pingyanchen, 650 were killed or wounded within the first two days of fighting) that Emperor Hirohito began to plead with his War Council to reconsider surrender. The recalcitrant members began to waver.
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The Soviet decision to break neutrality and enter the war against Japan changed their view on the continuation of war for more favorable surrender terms and accept the Potsdam declaration.
Having visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum myself, I would have to answer with a resounding no.
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