Should the atomic bombs been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

[Doug]

If it weren't for that, Japan would have fought to the death of every last person. As many people as the bomb killed, a prolonged war would have killed 10 times as many on BOTH sides.

If you are concerned with human life, dropping the bombs killed fewer people than an invasion would have.

Also, on top of that, we may have wound up at war with Russia if it weren't for that display of power. That would have killed countless thousands over many years.

Agreed. Sadly, there was no right answer to ending the US war with Japan. Could have blockaded the islands until they were starved into surrender, but that would probably have taken a very very long time and cost just as many people as the bombs did. And thats assuming even then they would surrender from starvation.

 

[IrrelevantTangent]

It was a war crime if you ask me.

So no it shouldn't have.

Aye, the should have gave them a more obvious warning then "were goign to bomb you" like "were goign to bomb you with a new weapon that will take out a couple hundred miles of land and life and keep it nuclear wasted for the next 40 years"
america may be the land of the free but its a very brutal nation

They couldn't do that. If the Americans had even given the slightest hint to the Japanese about what they were doing, the Japanese would have evacuated the cities and built bomb shelters. I'm sure not even the leaders of the Japanese at the time were so suicidally overconfident to think 'So what?' is a good response to the US telling them, 'Give up or we'll utterly obliterate two of your cities with ease.'

 

[Credge]

It wouldn't have mattered. Instead of A-Bombs we'd have done what we did to Tokyo.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_in_World_War_II

 

[Archon]

When the time came to decide whether to use the A-Bomb, the Allies had already fire-bombed Dreseden and Tokyo, and if you haven't read about the horrific loss of life those bombing raids caused, then you can't begin to understand the decision-making process that led to dropping the A-Bomb.

World War II was not like any war any of us on these forums have participated in or seen on TV. World War II was total war, and civilians were simply not off limits to either side. Both the Allies and the Axis had made it clear that conditional armistice was not an option.

With their banzai charges and suicide-over-surrender behavior, the Japanese were telling the Allies that they were fully prepared to fight to the death against the West. The Allies called their bluff by proving they actually *were* willing to kill every last Japanese person on the islands in order to win. It was only when faced with an actual choice of surrender or genocide of the entire Japanese race that the Emperor chose surrender.

The atomic bomb was not inherently necessary for the Japanese to be convinced of their imminent annihilation. The Allies were, in fact, willing to destroy Japan, and were doing a good job of it with fire-bombing using thousands of bombers, well before the A-Bomb got dropped.

The A-Bomb was just a quicker and easier method of achieving the same goal as the fire-bombing. It let us make it look easy, suggesting we could casually wipe our enemies out of existence. (And it wasn't racial. We fire-bombed Germany too, and we developed the A-Bomb to use on them, initially). That's the context in which the decision was made: Having already decided we might have to wipe everybody out, we decided to show we could do so pretty fast, hoping they'd surrender and we wouldn't have to.

So, really, "should the A-Bomb have been dropped" is the wrong question to ask. The right questions to ask are:
1) Was unconditional victory so important that the Allies should have been willing to inflict massive civilian death? i.e. was "strategic bombing" necessary
2) If so, was using a new weapon that made inflicting massive civilian death faster and better the right decision?

You have to look to your own morality to answer question #1, but if you say "yes" to it, it's hard to say that using the A-Bomb was wrong. In short, if you want to criticize the A-Bomb, criticize strategic bombing as a whole.

(For more details on the above line of thought, check out the excellent book "Japan's War", by Edwin Hoyt, which traces the course of World War II from the Japanese perspective.)

 

[Talon_Kale]

the idea of making these god aweful things is that you should never HAVE to use them. All the major countries (and alot of the smaller ones)have them and knowing that aught to be enough reason never to use them.

The point of dropping these was to protect people by forceing a Japanese surrender but in my mind killing people to protect people is a contradiction. This tradgedy should have been avoid and the blame lie firmly on the heads of the world collective leader for allowing things to devolve that far.

There will never be a good excuse for death on such a massive scale as these monstrosities are capable of. We would all be better served if they were removed. But since we humans seem incapable of getting along with one and other all the time some method of defence (a deterant if you will) is necessary.

He who has the biggest stick wins. the trick is to give everyone the same sized stick thus leveling the playing field.

 

[Sixties Spidey]

Yes. If they didn't, World War 2 would have lasted much longer. Although the sad thing is that, in this action, they killed extreme amounts of innocent people in the process. Which makes it feel somewhat... anticlimactic.

 

[Audemas]

Look, this situation had a shitty ending anyway you look at it. From America's viewpoint it was either (since we know that the Japanese would fight to the last man) we invade Japan and risk losing hundreds of thousands of lives of our soldiers or Japanese soldiers or we drop a bomb that does a lot of damage and kills a lot of innocents. So put yourself in Truman's shoes for a minute. Either kill a large number of Japanese people or have a large number of your own soldiers killed. By they, didn't Japan attack us first when we tried to stay out of it? Pearl Harbor anyone? How about the innocent soldiers who were unaware of a sneak attack! That was a dirty move on Japan's part. Oh and we dropped that bomb for a reason, we wanted to show what happens when you fuck with us like Japan did.

 

[FarleShadow]

Yes. Yes they should. Oh wait, they did and stupid moral arguments that question actions that have already happened is pointless.

Oh sorry, I forgot that the internet isn't populated with intelligent people. Again.

A little harsh, perhaps, but I'm with you in spirit. The "O NOES TEH WAR CRIME" crowd just skip the fact that many more died in the bombings of Tokyo than died in either city. That's even if you count cancer deaths, which by rights you shouldn't after the first generation; the small number dying from any background effects or heredity would be far outweighed by the number of people who wouldn't otherwise have existed because their parents died in a stupid holdout action. And blaming the US for 3rd world war crimes when you've got the record of the Soviet Union is showing poor target prioritization.

Here's the thing that most people seem to forget, during this war, most of the countries involved (America less so) were pretty much in a state of total war, that means every industry is devoted to working for the war effort, so you could just bomb the shit out of an industrial area because those factories were probably working towards either equipment or supplies for the soldiers that you'd be fighting. And its not like this was a nice clean war, where everyone has a cup of tea, loads their rifles and takes turns shooting at targets while a referee decides who is the winner. This was a WAR, death, murder and playing as unfair as possible are the objectives as long as you win. Hell, Japan was training schoolgirls to attack American troops, schoolgirls!

NUKES R TEH BAD seems to be the soup of the day for most people, but then again most people are stupid.

 

[brtshstel]

So a number of Japanese civilians were killed by the Atomic bomb. Yes, that's awful.

But did he Japanese think of civilian casualties when they bombed Chinese cities? Did they consider the lives of American civilians in Hawaii? Hell no they didn't.

If it took two, not one, but two of the world's most powerful and destructive weapon ever seen, plus the threat of Tokyo going next, to get them to sign the papers, it speaks volumes on how little the Imperial Japanese Empire cared about human life. They wouldn't have stopped unless either they were starved into submission from naval blockades or were finally annihilated by the pending invasion by the Red Army. In my eyes, the atrocious power (albiet primative and weak by the next year) of the the first two atomic bombs are the reason they have never been used in anger ever since.

Yes, it was the right move. And call me whatever name you want, I am a firm believer in nuclear deterrence. They are a necessary evil in order to keep wannabe gods like Kim Jong Il and revolutionary thugs (not naming names) from getting ahold of some material off the black market (or making their own) and getting an attitude. And I think the balance of power and fear of "mutaully-assured destruction" between the East and West is what ultimately kept the Cold War from becoming anything but a couple of proxy wars and one big giant pissing contest.

 

[Arcade_Fire]

I've always wondered about something...

Instead of dropping bombs on two major cities and killing a whole bunch of people, couldn't the United States have scared Japan in surrendering just as easily by dropping one a few miles of shore?

Less people die, still scares enemies shitless...

 

[kzap333]

Japan was offered to surrender after the first bomb was dropped,

I think they would have surrender after the first bomb. If the US had given them time to see the total damager over the long term. Also I think after seeing the damage of the first bomb the US where eager to see what the second 'better' one could do, so they didn't want Japan to serenader just then.

 

[SkinnySlim]

Would it have been acceptable to split Japan with another Iron Curtain like Berlin? Stalin was salivating to get his hands on Japan. Besides, it's already been said that civilians would have been killed in droves had a ground invasion taken place. More than the atomic bombs? We will never know, but what we do know is that Japan was the aggressor, and they got kicked in the teeth. But, yet again, it's easy to hate on America. Don't you think Japan would have dropped the bomb on Pearl Harbor if they had it? And why are we not talking about the disgusting atrocities committed by Japan during the war? Let's ask the Chinese if it was OK to drop the bomb on Japan...

 

[GruntOwner]

Should the bombs have been dropped? Absoloutely, it stopped a potentially long conflict and allowed the USA to get it's ass over the pond and help out a little more directly than simple trade.

Should it have been dropped on 2 civilian targets selected for no reason other than to maximise the blast through their terrain features? Absoloutely not. A military target would have been far more suitable and Hiroshima/Nagasaki as targets would no doubt be considered a breach of the Genaeva Convention nowadays.

Edit: The above statement has been pointed out as bollocks. Thanks go to oralloy for correcting me on the subject.