Was nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki the right decision?

[Eddie Teach]

Stalin does not seem the kind of guy who would have let some spy reports about a supposed mega-bomb discourage him from his plans.

I dunno, Stalin seemed pretty cautious overall in his foreign affairs. He invaded when there was the opportunity to do so without opposition. He didn't even enter the war with Japan until it was almost over.

[Valmy]

Stalin does not seem the kind of guy who would have let some spy reports about a supposed mega-bomb discourage him from his plans.

I dunno, Stalin seemed pretty cautious overall in his foreign affairs. He invaded when there was the opportunity to do so without opposition. He didn't even enter the war with Japan until it was almost over.

Yeah when he was not being invaded by Nazi Germany he preferred to attack small countries that were not expected to resist much.

[Eddie Teach]

Yeah when he was not being invaded by Nazi Germany he preferred to attack small countries that were not expected to resist much.

And he only did that when the big countries were busy.

[Josquius]

Don't know enough about Soviet thinking of the time to say.
If the fears of them rolling over Berlin and right into WW3/2.5 held true without the bombings then yes. It was justified.

So the bombings wouldn't be justified to save Japanese and American lives, but they would be to save European lives?  Disconcerting.

It's not an easy moral choice.
Even if you could guarantee you are killing a million now to save 10 million later you're still killing a million innocents.

Though the japanese would have been amongst that number too. No race dimension from me. Though there was in American reasoning of the time

[celedhring]

I'd say yes. Drawing out the war would have caused more deaths for everyone involved, Japanese included.

I'd also say that the horror of those bombings has been one of the reasons for the fact that no other nuclear bomb has been detonated in anger since then.

[The Brain]

Yes. What is the reasoning of people here who say no?

According to Wiki:

Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in his memoir The White House Years:


In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.[76]

Other U.S. military officers who disagreed with the necessity of the bombings include General of the Army Douglas MacArthur,[77][78] Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy (the Chief of Staff to the President), Brigadier General Carter Clarke (the military intelligence officer who prepared intercepted Japanese cables for U.S. officials), Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz (Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet), Fleet Admiral William Halsey, Jr. (Commander of the US Third Fleet), and even the man in charge of all strategic air operations against the Japanese home islands, then-Major General Curtis LeMay:


The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.

— Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, [69]


The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons... The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

— Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman, 1950, [79]


The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.

— Major General Curtis LeMay, XXI Bomber Command, September 1945, [80]

The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment... It was a mistake to ever drop it... [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it...

— Fleet Admiral William Halsey, Jr., 1964, [80]

Stephen Peter Rosen of Harvard believes that a submarine blockade would have been sufficient to force Japan to surrender.[81]

I personally have no idea

There are many reasons why you don't let the military make important decisions.

I'm also shocked that high-ranking military men would hesitate to let some gadget get the credit and not their own campaigns.

[grumbler]

Though the japanese would have been amongst that number too. No race dimension from me. Though there was in American reasoning of the time

So you are arguing that the fact that the bomb was built to use against Germany means that the US was being racist?  How do you then explain the US spending additional money to build a second bomb to use against non-Germans?

[Razgovory]

Stalin does not seem the kind of guy who would have let some spy reports about a supposed mega-bomb discourage him from his plans.

I dunno, Stalin seemed pretty cautious overall in his foreign affairs. He invaded when there was the opportunity to do so without opposition. He didn't even enter the war with Japan until it was almost over.

He did not believe he could fight the West until 20 years after WWII.  By then, it was impossible to do so because of nuclear weapons.

[Valmy]

He did not believe he could fight the West until 20 years after WWII.  By then, it was impossible to do so because of nuclear weapons.

Well that and the fact he was dead.

[Neil]

I think that it would be a mistake to view the dropping of the atomic bomb as a purely military decision.  Japan's military had been smashed to the point that they couldn't provide effective resistance in the air or at sea, and I think that Nimitz's statement is made from that viewpoint.  Halsey's statement was years after the fact, and from an officer who was notorious for shooting his mouth off.  LeMay's statement is kind of ambiguous.  It could be taken similarily to Nimitz's, or it could be taken (given LeMay's latter views) to create an equivalency between the atomic bombings and the firebombings that had been ongoing.  Still, in September 1945 it was probably too much to ask for LeMay to be well-informed about the inner workings of Japanese policymaking leading to the surrender. 

Leahy's statement is bizarre, although he was a huge opponent of even attempting to invent an atomic bomb.  Given that, as the President's Chief of Staff and thus the contact point between the Commander-in-Chief and his service chiefs, he was familiar with the devastating toll that US forces were exacting upon the Axis powers with their bombing raids, as well as the submarine campaign and bombardment from surface ships.  The carnage against civilians from the atomic bombings was nothing new, although it's possible that he objected to the efficiency of dropping a single bomb to destroy a city.  That would put him into the rather large category of men who lamented the tide of technology in warfare. 

[Malthus]

He did not believe he could fight the West until 20 years after WWII.  By then, it was impossible to do so because of nuclear weapons.

Well that and the fact he was dead.

Edward the First wasn't going to let a mere thing like death prevent him from beating on the Scots; presumably a mummified Stalin could gloriously lead the Soviet Union from beyond the grave as well!

[The Minsky Moment]

I read LeMay same as Neil - i.e. as saying that old-fashioned firebombing cities into infernos was just as effective.  Also same reading of Halsey, i.e. a big mouth shooting his mouth off without much thought. (we dropped the bomb because Oppenheimer forced the hand of the high command???)

Nimitz/Leahy both seem to be suggesting, without directly stating, that the US could have and should have accepted a conditional peace on the condition of retaining the Emperor, which probably was fairly easily obtainable sans A-Bomb.  That's a pretty sensible point in the sense that the US ended up doing that anyways.  However, it ignores that politically it would have been impossible for Truman to back away from the unconditional surrender demand position, regardless of its wisdom.  My understanding is that Japan was not ready to contemplate that prior to a-bomb strikes.

[CountDeMoney]

Politically expedient grudges: because if they can't fit, then dammit, we'll make 'em fit!

Shadow of Nanjing hangs over Hiroshima
Updated: 2016-05-11 15:47
China Daily, Official Non-Official Party Mouthpiece

The White House announced on Tuesday that US President Barack Obama will visit Hiroshima later this month when he visits the country to attend the G7 Summit. It will be the first visit by a sitting US president. However, it would be wrong to interpret this as a message that the US is apologizing for the atomic bomb it dropped on Hiroshima in August 1945, which killed tens of thousands of Japanese.

Hiroshima was the target for the world's first use of a nuclear weapon. A US Army Air Force B-29 called the Enola Gay – the name of the flight commander's mother – dropped the Uranium-235 implosive device. Around 75,000 people were killed immediately and another estimated 125,000 died in the following years from the radiation and other injuries they sustained.

Three days later, the only other use of nuclear weapons against a human-inhabited target so far took place, when another US B-29 bomber carrying a more powerful plutonium device destroyed the Japanese city of Nagasaki.

US policymakers led by then president Harry S. Truman approved the attacks as a desperate measure to end World War II without having to launch Operation Olympic, the allied invasion of the home islands of Japan.

Sober US military assessments estimated that the invasion might cost hundreds of thousands Americans dead and millions more Japanese casualties.

The war that Truman wanted to end as rapidly as possible had already cost, by most recent estimates, 80 million lives including at least 27 million Russian dead, 16 million Chinese, overwhelmingly civilians, and the six million Jewish victims of the Nazi Holocaust.

But what is always forgotten across the United States and Europe is that the terrible war did not begin with the Nazi invasion of Poland in September 1939: it began with the Japanese invasion and effort to conquer China in 1937.

In the first nightmarish summer of war in 1937, the Japanese Imperial Army drove west up the Yangtze River Valley, slaughtering everyone in their path.

When they reached the Chinese capital of Nanjing, they carried out the first monstrous atrocity of the war, the Rape of Nanjing, killing at least 300,000 people and the mass rape of untold numbers of Chinese women. The atrocities were so terrible they even shocked card-carrying German members of the Nazi Party who witnessed them.

Ironically, the city of Hiroshima played a fateful role in these awful events. For the Imperial Japanese Army's military headquarters from which the drive up the Yangtze and the subjugation of Nanjing were directed was based in Hiroshima.

In the more than 70 years since those awful events, Hiroshima has become the symbol of the feared new nuclear age. It is, therefore, understandable that the Japanese media are stressing the issue of nuclear non-proliferation. That should be a priority issue at the G7 Summit. That is especially the case since it follows so rapidly after the conclusion of US President Barack Obama's latest Nuclear Security Summit in Washington, DC.

But as today's government in Tokyo supports the confrontational US maritime policies in the South China Sea, those attending the summit would also do well to recall the reckless, headlong charge into war of the militarist Japanese governments of the 1930s.

For the road to Hiroshima truly began with the atrocities of the drive up the Yangtze eight years earlier.

The author is a national columnist for the Post-Examiner online newspapers in the US and senior fellow of the American University in Moscow. He is the author of Cycles of Change: The Three Great Cycles of American History

[Razgovory]

The Japanese prefer the term "The date that kinda went of the rails with Nanjing".

[Admiral Yi]

Picking up on Joan's point, I think it's also important to keep in mind that the unconditional surrender pledge was made not because the Allies were a bunch of meanies but because it was a way to ensure the alliance didn't fracture.

I think the point about the probable ease of obtaining a conditional surrender with retention of the emperor is largely a leap of faith.  There was no historical pattern of conditional surrendering in Japan.  The Japanese military caste was a suicide cult.