The Nuking of Japan

[Creed of Heresy]

No offense here, Shell, but preferring the US to surrender in the face of the Japanese aggression? That's a foolish sentiment to take, though I'll assume you mean it rhetorically rather than literally, given the absolute cruelty the Japanese showed towards those they defeated. The way history played out resulted in the nation of Japan being what it is today...and you know, a pacifistic nation with a mandate to never use its military for the purposes of aggression? Hm.

Now, see, the thing is that the Japanese were told that absolute annihilation of their military forces and their homeland would be inevitable if they refused to surrender via the Potsdam Declaration. The Soviets did not declare war or begin its move upon Japanese territory until after the first atomic bombing, when the second demand for surrender was made and rejected...and when the Japanese learned of the Soviet invasions, they began imposing martial law to prevent ANYONE from attempting to broker peace.

The Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov had informed Tokyo of the Soviet Union's unilateral abrogation of the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact on 5 April. At two minutes past midnight on 9 August, Tokyo time, Soviet infantry, armor, and air forces had launched the Manchurian Strategic Offensive Operation. Four hours later, word reached Tokyo that the Soviet Union had declared war on Japan. The senior leadership of the Japanese Army began preparations to impose martial law on the nation, with the support of Minister of War Korechika Anami, in order to stop anyone attempting to make peace.

From: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bomb...939_August

Now, if we move on to the point of killing that many civilians...this is always a dark thing to talk about and is exactly why WWII is so infamous. Overall, somewhere between 50-million to 70-million people died, and only 15-million of them were military personnel. The Japanese, for their part, accounted for about 15,000,000 civilian casualties, directly targeted in fact; not industrial centers or military targets leveled through bombings. Rather, about 12,000,000 of these were DIRECTLY TARGETED by the Japanese military as part of their plans to cull the populations and make them more subservient to Japanese authority via intimidation. It also had a lot to due with racial beliefs held by the Japanese Empire; that they were the Children of God, as they felt themselves children of the Emperor who was God on earth, and all others were inferior to them.

Now, the entire thing about WWII is how utterly immoral it all was...but the Japanese weren't innocent, and in fact from everything that's been learned over the last almost 70 years about them, they were at least on par with, if not actually more heinous and disgusting than the Nazis. Comparing the 250,000 killed in those bombings to the tens of millions they murdered, raped, and actually enslaved?

All the same...I agree. I abhor the targeting of civilians under any circumstance. I'm not saying the nuclear bombings were good. Not in any sense. Only that I understand why they were done. Doesn't mean I forgive the fact it happened. And in truth if I had to make such a decision, I don't know how I would react to it.

I mean if we consider all the options...would Soviet rule over the Japanese have been so much better? Look at East Germany, and what state it was in when the wall finally came down, and all the hundreds of thousands of people that kept disappearing there while they were under Soviet domination. If the Russians had invaded Japan, and taken them under control...I don't think Japan would be in as good a state today as it is.

In this case it's the lesser of two evils. It was part of what brought Japan to its knees. We don't know what might have happened otherwise but we can glimpse at what might have happened by looking at history, both before, during, and after the bombings...and I am pretty damn sure that if the bomb hadn't been dropped...it would've been much worse. Horrible as it sounds.

---

Shell: Wrong, hun. August 8th, 1945, Russia declared war. August 6th, 1945, the US dropped the first nuke. I DID look it up.

[System of Solace]

Here is some things I found on the internet:

Cool. I've found many things on the internet about this same subject that have proved to be faulty and without evidence. The "Japan-US" peace messages is considered a conspiracy theory by some.

I've also heard verified sources say otherwise. That the emperor and the Japanese people were far from surrender and would fight until end unless commanded otherwise by their emperor.

Anyways, the Japenese were willing to surrender upon one condition. The emperor remains. They were willing to make all sorts of concessions.

Now the Emperor was sort of god to them, they didn't want to lose that way of life for obvious reasons that it was rooted in their culture.

The first question is why not compromise, why force them to surrender only on your terms?

Same reason the Nazi Flensburg government was not allowed to rule. They would establish the same sort of country, maybe less militaristic, but they would not take the chance of having another Nazi Germany/Facist Japan rise.

Another is, with this statement:

The nuclear blasts were designed to shock and terrify the public and the leadership into realizing that they could, and would, be annihilated...without ever being able to even put up a fight. Better to surrender and live, than to die without even the dignity of a fight.

This is saying "nuking you and annihilating you" is FINE AND MORAL from US point of view.

Who said that? And part of this is true, it terrified Japan into surrender.

This one issue I have with it. When you force a person to do chose between two options, whatever the "punishment" for the wrong choice, it should be "moral" yet.

Basically, it's saying if they didn't surrender, then it is justified to nuke them till they are annihalated.

Basically this is the fear US wanted Japan to have of them, well congratulations, that is the monster much of the world sees now.

A country willing nuke a country to annihilation if they don't get the exact surrender on their own terms.

IF it's all about saving lives, why couldn't the Japanese have been allowed to surrender on the terms they suggest (everything agreed upon except they get to keep the Emperor).

There you go with the "If they didn't surrender". I was arguing the morality of the nuking, not the morality of doing something that we didn't do because of something that didn't happen.

If a terrorist organization says you support killing civilians (like drones killing civilans in Pakistan + like supporting Israel bombing civilains for a few soldiers captured/killed, as a measured response) and you support sanctions that are destroying the lives of our people, and if you don't stop, we will kill your civilians. We see no way to stop you but force you to stop because your civilians will continuously get killed.

Right now, most people condemn terrorism and see no justification to it.

But if we go by the logic of these two nukes being justified as a means to an end, I don't see how you can condemn one and not the other.

IF you say a few killing of civilains here and there, won't cause US to deter, then what if billions of people are convinced terrorism is not "evil" but "justified" from the perspective of ends justify the means, like nuking two cities to force surrender in the case of Japan which would save lives ofcourse if and only if Allies and US didn't accept the surrender proposal of Japanese...

This.....it's just plain stupid. More "what if" arguments. ONCE AGAIN, I was arguing on with you on the morality of what happened, not the morality of what did not happen and what would be very unlikely to happen. I don't support our overseas occupations. I don't support US drone strikes killing citizens (obviously). Neither do I support Israeli actions. Pakistan and Israel. The crimes on both sides committed by who? Radical theists.


And one more thing, remember how much the Japanese loved MacArthur? I'm sure if the US was as evil as you claim he would have been a dictator and punished and oppressed them.

[Shell B]

A United States surrender to Japan only would not have meant a Japanese occupation. You forget there must be terms to surrender. You can surrender and essentially have it mean, "Yeah, let's just go back to our own business and stop killing each other." Yes, I do mean it. I would rather see my country surrender with good terms than nuke people.

This needs to be visited.





Don't like the pictures? Tough. You're advocating it, or at least making excuses for it. No excuse for that. None. It wasn't an accident. It wasn't necessary. It was deliberate. I will be the first to say that they were desperate times. I think those who did it did not realize the absolute power of what they were unleashing. Even by the time they bombed Nagasaki, the extent of what they had done was not known. It was horror visited upon civilians. Sheer, absolute horror on the largest scale ever.

My apologies, COH, it was the day before Nagasaki. Not Hiroshima. My point remains.

---

CoH, what do you think those bombs were aimed at? We directly targeted civilians too.

Japan would not have refused to surrender, as evidenced by the fact that they surrendered well before they were "annihilated."

[Anomalocaris]

You miss the impact of the fog of war. In war nothing is as clear as they appear 60 years later. When things are unclear, and you have an abundance of brute strength deployable at little cost, you don't wonder what "Just enough" is. You deploy it. This is especially true since unlike a rag tag band of guerillas in Afghanistan, Japan was a industrialized nation with not insignificant scientific and technical prowess. You really can't be quite sure exactly what rabbit they might just pull out of their hats that you didn't see. Maybe they are working on their own fucking bomb. (Which they were, BTW)

Also, at the end of WWII in Europe, there were German U-Boat with consignment of yellow cake (The precursor material to bomb grade Uranium) on-route to Japan. These U-boats surrendered as per orders of German naval high command. But the fact that Germans were shipping bomb precursors to Japan must have have raise some serious alarm in Washington and prompted some desire to bomb them before they get a bomb and bomb us.

[System of Solace]

Of course. He accused me of supporting US nuking 100%. Which was a total misrepresentation of my argument.

I'm confused. If you're not 100 percent behind it, what percentage are you then? And how exactly would your less-than-100 percent position be different compared to being 100 percent for nuking? What would you have done differently?

I meant that any other option that would have guaranteed Japanese surrender with less bloodshed would have been better. But that is obvious.

A United States surrender to Japan only would not have meant a Japanese occupation. You forget their must be terms to surrender. You can surrender and essentially have it mean, "Yeah, let's just go back to our own business and stop killing each other." Yes, I do mean it. I would rather see my country surrender with good terms than nuke people.

This needs to be visited.

I do agree. But do you think a country hungry for revenge would have taken that? They would have rebelled if such a thing happened. They were hungry for revenge for Pearl harbor and for dragging the US into WW2.

My point is, you have a great point. That was a better idea. And it would been nice if it was so apparently necessary to become involved in WW2 (although it is arguable if Britain would have succeeded on the western front with just our supplies and weaponry. They did not have a great amount of manpower like Russia.). But, it was just not possible at the time. And that's what we have to argue. Not what was right or wrong then or now, but what was possible at the time and still more moral than the other decisions.

[Minimalist]

Position C:

The bombings were irrelevant. We had inflicted far more death and destruction with the massive fire bomb raids beginning in March of 1945.
Combined with the near total sea blockade by the submarine force and the series of carrier-based air raids on Japan in July of 1945 which finished off the IJN, Japan was finished as a major power. MacArthur aside, the hardships of the coming winter would have forced the Japs to surrender, without landing on Japan proper.

The problem was Russia. At Potsdam Stalin had promised to enter the war 3 months after the surrender of Germany. Germany surrendered on May 7. 90 days later was August 7. Truman and the Joint Chiefs were not prepared to allow Stalin to run roughshod over Asia for an entire winter while the Japs starved to death. Hiroshima was bombed on August 6. Coincidence? Really?

Looking back in retrospect probably far fewer Japanese died in the atomic bombings than would have died in the famine which was barely averted by the surrender. But I suspect that the Japanese were not the decisive factor in making the decision. The Russians were.

[Mystic]

Cool. I've found many things on the internet about this same subject that have proved to be faulty and without evidence. The "Japan-US" peace messages is considered a conspiracy theory by some.

So this can be a conspiracy but everything you are told by winner side that would never come out and say, we nuked them to show off our power, is reliable?

I've also heard verified sources say otherwise. That the emperor and the Japanese people were far from surrender and would fight until end unless commanded otherwise by their emperor.

This is how they present it, but what they mean by that, is surrender on total terms of US and Allies. This is a trick of semantics. They were willing to surrender.

Same reason the Nazi Flensburg government was not allowed to rule. They would establish the same sort of country, maybe less militaristic, but they would not take the chance of having another Nazi Germany/Facist Japan rise.

So basically you nuke two cities over a chance of Facist Japanese rising again?

So it's not all about saving lives, it's about getting everything your way.

Why not admit the other thing they got their way with the nuking? Power in the eyes of the world.

Who said that? And part of this is true, it terrified Japan into surrender.

So your saying US was threatening Japan with something they believe was immoral? How does that make it better anyways?

There you go with the "If they didn't surrender". I was arguing the morality of the nuking, not the morality of doing something that we didn't do because of something that didn't happen.

IT's something in the words of the OP, US would have done. Why is what US would have done any less worse then actually having done it?

If a terrorist organization says you support killing civilians (like drones killing civilans in Pakistan + like supporting Israel bombing civilains for a few soldiers captured/killed, as a measured response) and you support sanctions that are destroying the lives of our people, and if you don't stop, we will kill your civilians. We see no way to stop you but force you to stop because your civilians will continuously get killed.

Right now, most people condemn terrorism and see no justification to it.

But if we go by the logic of these two nukes being justified as a means to an end, I don't see how you can condemn one and not the other.

IF you say a few killing of civilains here and there, won't cause US to deter, then what if billions of people are convinced terrorism is not "evil" but "justified" from the perspective of ends justify the means, like nuking two cities to force surrender in the case of Japan which would save lives ofcourse if and only if Allies and US didn't accept the surrender proposal of Japanese...

This.....it's just plain stupid. More "what if" arguments. ONCE AGAIN, I was arguing on with you on the morality of what happened, not the morality of what did not happen and what would be very unlikely to happen. I don't support our overseas occupations. I don't support US drone strikes killing citizens (obviously). Neither do I support Israeli actions. Pakistan and Israel. The crimes on both sides committed by who? Radical theists.

This is a red herring. If you can justify nuking two cities, you can justify terrorism easy.

[Shell B]

I completely understand that what was done then was done under the duress of war. I even said that I don't think the extent of what they were doing was even remotely clear. We had just made the fucking things. To be fair, though, they could just as easily have dropped pesticide byproduct chemicals and had roughly the same result without the property damage and carnage.

[Anomalocaris]

This is a red herring. If you can justify nuking two cities, you can justify terrorism easy.

If you can carpet bomb a city, you can justify nuking a city.

If you can justify pin point bombing in a city, you can justify carpeting bombing a city.

This chain of association is stupid.

In way anything you can do onto others you can justify. Anything others can do onto you is utterly without justification.

[Creed of Heresy]

Well if we're going to bring up pictures.



<-- Chinese civilians (hey, I see a child in the lower right, there...) about to be buried alive by Japanese soldiers





"A Japanese newspaper report of the Contest To Cut Down 100 People.

This news was originally reported by the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun in December 13, 1937. Both soldiers were extradited to China after the war, tried for their actions in Chinese court, and were executed on January 28, 1948."

Japanese soldiers shooting at blindfolded and cuffed Sikh prisoners.

You don't like the images? Well, you're the one saying you'd like to go about your business with a nation doing THAT daily over the course of YEARS rather than do a fraction of that kind of murder twice over the course of less than week. PLEASE revoke that sentiment that you would have preferred our surrender to them, because you're essentially saying you'd like us to be guilty of standing by and doing nothing. I understand the...well, the idea, I suppose, that you'd have wanted us to the bigger men. But there's better ways of saying it, alright?

Ultimately, Japan surrendered not in any part to themselves but actually to US capitulation. They refused to surrender due to FOUR terms that they refused to let be changed, and they only surrendered when the United States and the Six basically caved in because we didn't WANT to exterminate or enslave them; we wanted to just end the damn war [that last bit there is for you, MysticKnight].
Chief among them that they refused to let war crime trials be run against them and they refused to let the Emperor be disempowered [despite the fact all roads of horror led to him]. It is these two terms primarily that we, the ones with the obvious advantage and the capacity to annihilate actually went and BUCKLED on. And it's worth noting that a coup d'état was actually staged by the military to try to PREVENT THE SURRENDER. [AGAIN, MYSTIC KNIGHT. AGAIN. For you.]

Again. I am not arguing against the horror of the bombs. And I will always agree that they were immoral, horrible actions. But I also will not back down on this point: They were necessary. Necessity is a cruel thing to deal with.