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Originally posted by ibexsig:

Much as current history liberal culture wants to lay the whole firebombing scandal at the feet of Curtis Lemay or the American Government, the government of Japan did nothing for their citizens to keep them from being burnt to death.

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Originally posted by 220-9er:
My dad always said he (and therefore I) wouldn't be here if they hadn't nuked Japan.
When the war ended, he was in northern Philippines. They were shipped to Japan weeks later for a short time to help disarm the military. They traveled past both Nagasaki and Hiroshima during their travels and saw the results. . .

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Originally posted by MRMATT:
We shouldn't have stopped at two.

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Originally posted by Jimbo Jones:
Could we have made more (did we have the fissionable material)?

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Originally posted by MRMATT:
We shouldn't have stopped at two.

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I find my time invested was very valuable to me and completely changed my attitude to the Japanese people, I apologize to all the folks I hated because of my prejudice and vow to never let anyone lead me down that road again.

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Originally posted by Jimbo Jones:
Could we have made more (did we have the fissionable material)?

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Originally posted by MRMATT:
We shouldn't have stopped at two.

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Originally posted by Will938:
If you don't become a screen writer for comedy movies, then you're an asshole.

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Originally posted by MRMATT:
We shouldn't have stopped at two.

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Originally posted by Scoutmaster:

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Originally posted by 220-9er:
My dad always said he (and therefore I) wouldn't be here if they hadn't nuked Japan.
When the war ended, he was in northern Philippines. They were shipped to Japan weeks later for a short time to help disarm the military. They traveled past both Nagasaki and Hiroshima during their travels and saw the results. . .

I understand, incredible devastation and a traumatic experience. But the Japanese leaders could have chosen differently and avoided the disaster.

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Originally posted by Hound Dog:
People assume it was an either/or scenario: Either nuke two cities or invade Japan. In practice, I'm sure that had the US invaded, it would have been an "And" scenario: Invade Japan AND use the nukes against any sizeable Japanese targets. Either way, atom bombs would have been used against Japan.

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What journalists should know about the atomic bombings

by Alex Wellerstein, published June 9th, 2020

As we approach the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, even with everything else going on this year, we’re certainly going to see an up-tick in atomic bomb-related historical content in the news. As arbitrary as 5/10 year anniversaries are, they can be a useful opportunity to reengage the public on historical topics, and the atomic bombs are, I think, pretty important historical topics: not just because they are interesting and influential to what came later, but because Americans in particular use the atomic bombings as a short-hand for thinking about vitally important present-day issues like the ends justifying the means, who the appropriate targets of war are, and the use of force in general. Unfortunately, quite a lot of what Americans think they know about the atomic bombs is dramatically out of alignment with how historians understand them, and this shapes their takes on these present-day issues as well.

[...]

One thing I want to say up front: there are many legitimate interpretations of the atomic bombings. Were they a good thing, or a bad thing? Were they moral acts, or essentially war crimes? Were they necessary, or not? Were they avoidable, or were they inevitable, once the US had the weapons? What would the most likely scenario have been if they weren’t used? How should we think about their legacies? And so on, and so on. I’m not saying you have to subscribe to any one answer to those. However, a lot of people are essentially forced into one answer or another by bad historical takes, including bad historical takes that are systematically taught in US schools. There’s lot of room for disagreement, but let’s make sure we’re all on the same page about the broad historical facts, first. It is totally possible to agree with all of the below and think the atomic bombings were justified, and it’s totally possible to take the exact opposite position.

There was no “decision to use bomb”

The biggest and most important thing that one ought to know is that there was no “decision to use the atomic bomb” in the sense that the phrase implies. Truman did not weigh the advantages and disadvantages of using the atomic bomb, nor did he see it as a choice between invasion or bombing. This particular “decision” narrative, in which Truman unilaterally decides that the bombing was the lesser of two evils, is a postwar fabrication, developed by the people who used the atomic bomb (notably General Groves and Secretary of War Stimson, but encouraged by Truman himself later) as a way of rationalizing and justifying the bombings in the face of growing unease and criticism about them.

What did happen was far more complicated, multifaceted, and at times chaotic — like most real history. The idea that the bomb would be used was assumed by nearly everyone who was involved in its production at a high level, which did not include Truman (who was excluded until after Roosevelt’s death). There were a few voices against its use, but there were far more people who assumed that it was built to be used. There were many reasons why people wanted it to be used, including ending the war as soon as possible, and very few reasons not to use it. Saving Japanese lives was just not a goal — it was never an elaborate moral calculus of that sort. Rather than one big “decision,” the atomic bombings were the product of a multitude of many smaller decisions and assumptions that stretched back into late 1942, when the Manhattan Project really got started.

[...]

It was never a question of “bomb or invade”

Part of the “decision” narrative above is the idea that there were only two choices: use the atomic bombs, or have a bloody land-invasion of Japan. This is another one of those clever rhetorical traps created in the postwar to justify the atomic bombings, and if you accept its framing then you will have a hard time concluding that the atomic bombings were a good idea or not. And maybe that’s how you feel about the bombings — it’s certainly a position one can take — but let’s be clear: this framing is not how the planners at the time saw the issue.

The plan was to bomb and to invade, and to have the Soviet invade, and to blockade, and so on. It was an “everything and the kitchen sink” approach to ending the war with Japan, though there were a few things missing from the “everything,” like modifying the unconditional surrender requirements that the Americans knew (through intercepted communications) were causing the Japanese considerable difficulty in accepting surrender. I’ve written about the possible alternatives to the atomic bombings before, so I won’t go into them in any detail, but I think it’s important to recognize that the way the bombings were done (two atomic bombs on two cities within three days of each other) was not according to some grand plan at all, but because of choices, some very “small scale” (local personnel working on Tinian, with no consultation with the President or cabinet members at all), made by people who could not predict the future.

[...]

There were many reasons that the Americans wanted to drop the atomic bombs

There are two main explanations given to why the Americans dropped the atomic bombs. One is the “decision to use the bomb” narrative already outlined (end the war to avoid an invasion). The other, which is common in more left-leaning, anti-bombing historical studies, is that they did it to scare the Soviet Union (to show they had a new weapon). This latter position is sometimes called the Alperovitz thesis, because Gar Alperovitz did a lot of work to popularize and defend it in the 1980s and 1990s. It’s older than that, for whatever that is worth.

When I talk to students about the atomic bombings, I usually have them tell me what they know of them. Maybe 80% know the “decision to use the bomb” narrative (we could probably call this the Stimson narrative if we wanted to be consistent). I chart this out on the whiteboard, highlighting the key facts of it. A few in each class know the Alperovitz narrative, which they got from various alternative sources (like Oliver Stone and Peter Kuznick’s The Untold History of the United States documentary). We then discuss the implications of each — what does believing in either make you feel about World War II, the atomic bombings, about the United States as a world power today?

And then I tell them that historians today tend to reject both of these narratives. Which makes them want to throw their hands up in frustration, I am sure, but that’s what scholarship is about.

I’ve written a bit on this in the past, but the short version is that historians have found that both of these narratives are far too clean and neat: they both assume that the nation had a single driving purpose in using the atomic bombs. This isn’t the case. (And, spoiler alert, it’s almost never the case.) As already noted, the process had many different parts to it, and no single “decision” at all, and so one can find historical figures who had many different perspectives. What is interesting is that for those involved in the making of the bomb, and the highest-level decisions about its use, almost all of those perspectives converged on the idea of using it.

[...]

I think it is fair to say that the atomic bombs played a role in the Japanese surrender. It is clear they were one of the issues on their mind, both those in the military who wanted the country to resist invasion as bloodily as possible (with the hope of making the Allies accept more favorable terms for Japan), and those who wanted a diplomatic end of the war (though even those did not imagine accepting unconditional surrender — they wanted to preserve the imperial house).

It is also clear that the Soviet declaration of war and subsequent invasion of Manchuria loomed largely in all of their minds as well. Which is more important? Could we imagine the same results occurring if one hadn’t occurred? I don’t know. It’s complicated. It’s messy. Like the real world.

[...]

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Originally posted by MRMATT:
We shouldn't have stopped at two.


AND used it in Korea.

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Originally posted by Scoutmaster:
Something that would be interesting, but impossible, to know; what would the history have been had we not dropped the bomb?

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Meanwhile, the Soviet Union (which declared war on Japan on Aug. 8, 1945) was prepared to invade the Japanese northern islands from Manchuria. That would almost certainly have led to a Japan divided between a free South and a communist North. The Berlin Wall might have had a twin in Tokyo. The people of North Japan would have suffered for decades, like the people of East Germany and North Korea.