Hiroshima and Nagasaki at 65
I have blogged on this in the past, and simply restate my feelings now: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, if not war crimes, were certainly not necessary to end the war. I hold that it would have been more than adequate had a “warning shot” been detonated over mountains outside Tokyo, in full view of the capital, and then a warning given that a city a week would be obliterated if Japan did not surrender unconditionally. I do not accept any of the excuses about this; it was a clear alternative anyone could have seen, and had more merit than what was done.
The usual side concerns arise: while Hiroshima and Nagasaki were horrific, they paled in comparison to what the rest of Japan suffered in many ways. Carpet bombing of civilian populations killed far more people, and a person dying of third-degree burns likely feels little different if the burns came from conventional or nuclear weapons. The A-bombs were essentially the plane crash equivalents of war: they captured attention because they were unusual and horrifyingly spectacular in nature, even though more people died just as horribly by other means.
An interesting twist on this, the 65th anniversary of the bombings: the U.S. ambassador attended the ceremonies in Hiroshima, the first time an official American representative has been present at the proceedings. This was done with the intention of showing America’s commitment to nuclear disarmament, but some Japanese were “disappointed” that America did not take this opportunity to offer an official apology for the bombings. That is very, very unlikely: many Americans tend to feel completely justified about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and get their backs up whenever anyone says differently. Were an American official to apologize in such a manner, there would be political hell to pay. But especially for Obama, who the right wing already pillories for “bowing to foreign leaders” and “apologizing for America” to foreign powers, if such an apology were made on his watch, he would pay an especially high price–not to mention that there is no evidence that he would agree that an apology is in order. Indeed, even sending the ambassador was too much for some people.
Then there is the question about the appropriateness of Japan asking for such an apology, considering the fact that Japan itself has never fully apologized to its Asian neighbors for acts just as horrible and extreme. Not that this has any bearing on any actions that might be taken by the U.S., nor does it suggest that people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are against Japan apologizing to countries such as China. But it does bring such facts to light.
Then there is the idea that America was especially guilty for using such weapons. One would have no doubt whatsoever that had Japan possessed such weapons during the war, that they would have used them without hesitation. Nor can Japan deny that intent, considering that Japan itself had not one, but two different nuclear weapons development programs underway during the war. If Japan was seeking to build nuclear weapons and had the unquestionable will to use them, how pure are Japan’s protestations about the inhumanity turned against themselves? Again, not that this excuses or justifies what America did, but if Japan truly wishes to make a statement against the use of such weapons, to claim victimhood only and ignore its own nuclear intent is more than just a little telling. To admit that the programs existed and those were just as wrong would be a much more powerful statement–and yet I have not heard anyone in Japan make such a statement.
This plays into the larger issue of Japan’s own views of what happened in WWII: its whitewashing of its own aggression and atrocities, its sharp and sometimes extreme focus on how Japan suffered with great emphasis on Japan’s victimhood. I have heard students tell of History teachers in public schools who teach up to the point where Japan started invading other countries, claim there is not enough time to cover all the material, and then jump to the last year of the war where Japan suffered most, without covering the intervening events. Films critical of Japan are regularly blocked or extremely limited, while films lionizing people like Hideki Tojo are well-received. It really does not seem that Japan is itself carrying out the self-introspection and regret that it expects of others.
I remember seeing one of Kurosawa’s final films, Rhapsody in August. It starred Richard Gere as an American nephew of a Japanese woman who comes to visit his family in Japan, learns about the bombings in which the woman’s husband died, and apologizes for what happened. Now, confronted with survivors of the bombings, I myself would offer an apology as an American, so I do not see such a concept as inappropriate. But for a Japanese filmmaker to write such a script is, to say the least, just a bit out of place. Imagine, for example, if an American director like Francis Ford Coppola were to make a movie based in Hawaii where a Japanese visitor learns of Pearl Harbor and decides to apologize to Americans for the attack; I doubt it would be well-received in Japan, nor would they feel it appropriate.
One other note: before this film, despite his status as a legend, Kurosawa had been unable to get funding for his films. George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg had to give Kurosawa the funding necessary to make both Kagemusha and Ran, both receiving widespread critical acclaim. For the less-well-received Rhapsody in August, however, Kurosawa had no trouble getting domestic funding. Take from that what you may.
In the end, I hold to Santayana’s advice: we must remember atrocities and injustices our own people have committed lest we commit those crimes again. Remembering the crimes committed against us by other nations and forgetting or forgiving what we ourselves have done is to ensure we will repeat those mistakes in the future. No one is immune from whitewashing their past; America does so quite often. However, despite right-wing anger and disapproval regarding Americans who “apologize” and “hate America” for recognizing the worst of our heritage, such observation is nothing less than the beginning of peace for the future, and necessary for a far more civilized world to live in.
This is a complicated issue, and while my thinking on it hasn’t changed over time I admit it can.
I personally think I individually or we Americans collectively don’t have to apologize for anything since apologies rip the act out of the context of events, context that is very important.
We can acknowledge that the area bombing campaign LeMay engaged in was contrary to human norms of war and only justifiable on the barest utilitarian grounds of getting the war over as soon as possible with the least Allied and collateral casualties.
This wider context of the war was that by late 1944 America had successfully fought the Japanese into a corner, and by taking the Marianas and developing the B-29 had created a shortcut to deciding the war on our terms — simply giving the Japanese a taste of their own medicine they had been enthusiastically dishing out on the poor Chinese for the past 10 years.
It was our hardening opposition to the Japanese atrocities in China that led the Japanese to directly (and suicidally) attack us.
Demonstrations are nice, but we in fact did give the Japanese a demonstration, the bomb over Hiroshima. That had little effect.
We gave them a second demonstration. That too had little effect, but really began to put the fear of God (so to speak) in what responsible power structure still existed in Japan.
Prior to the a-bombs, the militarist could argue that a last-stand on the model of the Nazis would perhaps bleed the Americans dry enough to convince us to back off and agree to an armistice.
The new bombs, AND our willingness to use them, was the final straw that broke the Japanese will to resist our final justice.
Japan’s primary Constitutional authority said as much in his first address to the Japanese people:
“Despite the best that has been done by everyone — the gallant fighting of the military and naval forces, the diligence and assiduity of Our servants of the State and the devoted service of Our one hundred million people, the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage, while the general trends of the world have all turned against her interest. Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to damage is indeed incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should We continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.”
If LeMay, Truman, and the B-29 pilots needed any justification for their acts, Hirohito himself gave it to them. The Japanese needed a very big stick to knock some sense back into them.
And the Japanese themselves got off pretty light in this war. They starved millions in Korea and China, largely destroyed Manila in their defense their empire, and of course outdid the Nazis, if such a thing were possible, in the brutality and pure evilness of their occupation and subjugation of China.
So I still disagree that second-guessing Truman’s decision is necessary or proper. His decision had the salutary attribute of being directly instrumental in securing the Japanese surrender to our terms, something we could not get from the Nazis without rooting them out of their bunkers in Berlin.
War is not a game or a morality play, war is beating the living sh— out of the other guy until he surrenders to your terms. There are really no fixed laws in war, the Japanese were honoring precious little existing norms of war, at least until they started losing, since the only law in war is what the winner will establish ex post facto.
Even the “Peace Faction” in the Tokyo of 1945 was living in a dreamland.
Their ambassador to Russia took the rather bold opportunity to speak his mind on that directly to Togo that July:
“If indeed our country is pressed by the necessity of terminating the war, we ourselves must first of all firmly to terminate the war. Without this resolution, an attempt to sound out the intentions of the Soviet Union will result in no benefit. In these days, with the enemy air raids accelerated and intensified, is there any meaning in showing that our country has reserve strength for a war of resistance, or in sacrificing the lives of hundreds of thousands of conscripts and millions of other innocent residents of cities and metropolitan areas?”
http://www.nuclearfiles.org/menu/library/correspondence/togo-sato/corr_togo-sato.htm
This was in response to Foreign Minister Togo trying to suss out some diplomacy from Stalin.
Togo’s
“The Soviet Union should be interested in, and probably will greet with much satisfaction, an abandonment of our fishery rights as an amendment to the Treaty of Portsmouth.”
betrays a fundamental disconnect to the dire reality of Japan’s position, and you can hear the exasperation in Sato’s reply:
“Moreover, the manner of your explanation in your telegram No. 891 –“We consider the maintenance of peace in Asia as one aspect of maintaining world peace”– is nothing but academic theory. For England and American are planning to take the right of maintaining peace in East Asia away from Japan, and the actual situation is now such that the mainland of Japan itself is in peril. Japan is no longer in a position to be responsible for the maintenance of peace in all of East Asia, no matter how you look at it.”
I tend to agree with Troy that historical apologies are quite meaningless: presumably, the Italians would have to apologize to practically the whole of Europe for the Roman Empire. Only countries like Andorra would owe apologies to noboby.
Perhaps the A-bombing of Japan was a necessary evil. All we can say is that it was regrettable and nothing to be proud of. If it had to be done, it was done -and that’s that. “Never explain, never complain.”
I hold that it would have been more than adequate had a “warning shot” been detonated over mountains outside Tokyo, in full view of the capital, and then a warning given that a city a week would be obliterated if Japan did not surrender unconditionally
Part of the challenge facing Truman is that we didn’t have the quantity of bombs in the pipeline to actually implement this strategy.
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB162/72.pdf
says there was one more for August, three or four for September. The rate of production was more “three a month”.
Also, we had already pretty much pounded Japan’s cities into rubble.
I wonder how much our voluntary preservation of Kyoto had to do with Japan’s decision to surrender. It had to be in the back of their minds, that all in fact had not yet been lost to the war, but very easily could be.
There is the theory that the real motivation of Truman was to impress Stalin in Yalta: “I am the top dog”, so to speak. If Hiroshima was not enough of a warning shot, it is doubtful that one detonated over mountains outside Tokyo would be of any help. As the French put it, “ce sont des choses qui arrivent”. It happened, and that’s that.
Troy:
I think that a warning shot would have had great advantages. First of all, it would have led the Japanese to believe that we had enough bombs that we could waste one on a warning shot. From their own programs, they doubtlessly knew how hard it might be to construct these weapons; maybe one reason they did not surrender within 2 days of Hiroshima, aside from the time necessary to investigate the extent of the damage and confirm what weapon had been used, was that they might have believed that the US did not have more than the one bomb. I am speculating here and not referring to any source, but that would seem to make sense.
Detonating an A-bomb just southwest of Tokyo, in a way that would make the entire city notice the flash and hear the thunder, and then see the mushroom cloud–and know that the enemy had just lobbed one of these as a warning shot, many more where we got that one… I cannot help but see that as being a far, far more powerful statement to the Japanese government at the time.
Dropping that one over Kanagawa on August 8, then hitting Hiroshima, say, on the 15th, then Nagasaki maybe ten days after that, and having 3 or 4 more lined up for September, seems a better way of handling it. Hit them with the shock and give them enough time to confirm and agree to surrender.
A side note: I wonder what would have happened had (a) we accepted a conditional surrender, or (b) took our time in letting Japan come around to surrendering unconditionally without the bomb. I think the A-bombs were a necessity, I just disagree strongly with the manner in which they were used.
Luis, I think I have read somewhere that Eisenhower was also against the use of the Bomb. It is a very decent position. The fact that Japan was already defeated lends some credence to the theory that it was an ego trip of Truman. On the other hand, there is no obvious reason for Churchill’s bombing of Dresden. I do not think it is necessary today to have strong feelings about it: it doesn’t seem to have deterred the Japanese to adopt a policy of close friendship with the U.S. to this day.
Eisenhower said: “It wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing”.
This may be strictly true but the people living in Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Kokura were living on borrowed time, a-bomb or no, since we had the capability and the will to send 1000 B-29s in a single attack by then.
The power of 1000 B-29s is just not something one can really conceptualize.
This photo:
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/58/Northfield-tinian-1945-2.jpg
shows the North Field of Tinian, the largest airfield in the world at the time, but it housed only 25% of the planes of our 1000-strong force.
It’s also difficult to know how close the Japanese were to surrendering to our terms, and how crucial the entry of the Soviets, and the quick collapse of the Japanese forces guarding the Manchurian borderlands, was to the final decision.
The moral onus wasn’t on the US to provide lenient terms to the Japanese, the onus was on the Japanese state to seek them.
Truman’s job was to bring the war to a satisfactory conclusion without undue losses to Americans, our allies, and the hundreds of millions of Asians still under the boot of Japanese militarism.
We’d already sold our soul when we started firebombing Japanese cities in early 1945, abandoning the costly daylight “pinpoint” bombing that the USAAF prosecuted (at great cost to itself) over Germany.
In retrospect, the bomb was clearly a horrible thing. But at the time, I think holding the perspective that it was just a very good implement to end the war was justifiable.
Revisionists like to argue that we could have waited more for the Japanese to figure out what to do, starving them (and everyone else in Asia) out while reality sunk in. This is true, but one does not win wars like WW2 by waiting. One wins total wars by slaughtering the enemy until he surrenders.
Isolated from the contingent horrors of the war, the bombings appear diabolical war crimes. In context, there were justice, payback, and demonstrations that the path of dilatory avoidance of reality was no longer possible for the Japanese state if it wished to have any continuance going forward.
I cannot help but see that as being a far, far more powerful statement to the Japanese government at the time.
So we can agree that they wouldn’t have surrendered after the warning shot and that the Hiroshima attack would have been a necessary demonstration of our will?
Then the issue just becomes the necessity of slaughtering the people of Nagasaki.
This is beginning to split hairs. The lives of the people of Nagasaki weren’t worth anything to us Americans.
If we want to think deeply about what we should have done, in the rstropective sense of knowing what we know now, clearly we could have handled the process that the Japanese government came to accept their utter defeat more efficiently and humanely to them.
Truman’s job, though, was bringing the war to an end, and the rather total dysfunctionality of the Japanese political apparatus makes even retrospective propositions hazardous.
The Japanese strategy was to seek our weak spots via suicidal resistance and press us to compromise to accede to something resembling an armistice. Any scaling back in our Potsdam demands would quite possibly be seen by them as a faltering of our national will, an opening to continue resistance.
We’re talking about a people whose soldiers were still coming out of the jungle in the 1970s!
The brutal treatment our Air Force gave to the Japanese homeland also forestalled any fragmentary surrender (there were still millions of Japanese troops fighting on the mainland) and also any “stab in the back” dynamic.
The Japanese military utterly failed their sacred mission to protect the Emperor and protect the homeland. To put it bluntly, AFAICT they had lost all face and were rightfully recognized as complete f—ups that brought ruin onto the nation.
I wonder what would have happened had (a) we accepted a conditional surrender
To the end the Japanese military’s idea of a conditional surrender was a return to the status quo ante of the occupation of Manchuria, plus the previous spoils of war the militarists had won from China and the League of Nations.
(b) took our time in letting Japan come around to surrendering unconditionally without the bomb
How many allied POW, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese civilian lives would you sacrifice for this wait?
Why should Truman suddenly halt the brutal B-29 campaign waiting for the Japanese to wake up? Wouldn’t the let up embolden those who argued for continued resistance? There was still plenty of food in Japan for the people with the guns. Everybody else was going to starve, but that wasn’t the Army’s problem.
Johnson and McNamara tried this bombing-halt-wait strategy with Vietnam. It didn’t work since it sent mixed messages that we were a humane people, conscious of international opinion, who didn’t really want to hurt them.
Having said all that, the one lesson Americans should learn, and our central moral failure of 1945, was to more fully identify the minimum we could accept for surrender and clearly communicate that to our enemy.
Plenty of US servicemen possibly died unnecessarily in 1945 — if we had offered the terms the Japanese eventually accepted the war could possible have been concluded in the aftermath of the Okinawa battle, say June 1945 or so, as Okinawa demonstrated that the Japanese Army and Navy could not stop the American juggernaut on the ground or sea.
But even here one can see the timing is pretty tight. Also, plenty of people in policy positions in the US were racist and nationalist bastards who wanted to really grind the Japanese down on the general principle. Additionally, the position of the Emperor was something of a sticking point internally, too. We’d just spent the previous 4 years totally demonizing the guy, putting him on equal footing to Hitler. Backtracking on that took some finesse, both within the civil government, between the civil government and the military brass, and with our public diplomacy aka propaganda.
Also, I’m not sure how necessary all the firebombing of Japan really was. But the USAAF wanted to pull their own weight to prove their theories of strategic bombing, and of course the Japanese had shown absolutely no hesitance about bombing civilians so there really wasn’t any point in restraining ourselves for their sake.
The wartime was really a different planet from our modern one, really. The best we can do is just accurately understand the true history perhaps. Precious few people have done that.
In my view, Eisenhower was right. It is not unreasonable to believe that Truman had ulterior motives: perhaps Eisenhower was more aware of the image of the U.S. as a shinning example of decency and morality to the world. But, as I said, I consider unnecessary today’s lucubrations about what could have been and wasn’t.
I take exception to
“I hold that it would have been more than adequate had a “warning shot” been detonated over mountains outside Tokyo, in full view of the capital, and then a warning given that a city a week would be obliterated if Japan did not surrender unconditionally.”
Nobody was sure the bomb would work. There were only two functional bombs at the time. No place to waste a shot on warning.
Truman’s mistake wasn’t Hiroshima. Okinawa and the continued resistance to (horrific) conventional bombing showed that only the most extreme measures possible would compel the Japanese to surrender. I’m sorry that it had to be done, but I don’t think any lesser demonstration would have been effective, given the Japanese mindset of the time.
No, Truman’s mistake was not taking the bomb against Stalin and Mao while he had the chance. This would have avoided the Cold War, enormous civilian casualties and hardships in both countries and made the world a much safer place. I can understand why the US was tired of fighting the war. But I wish they had finished the job. Stalin was every bit as evil and deserving of defeat as Hitler was. Even many Russians agreed with that.
Well, Geoff, you make it patently clear that both Russia and China did well in developing their own atomic arsenal as soon as they could. Come to think of it, perhaps Iran is also right in developing its own. Either that, or risk being bombed by the U.S. for their evil means. By the way, was it not also Bush Jr. who wanted to finish the job of Bush Sr.? These finishing jobs can get extremely complicated … The West used to seek “civilizing” the world by imposing Christianity. You propose that the U.S. should have done it by imposing democracy: be reasonable, do it my way. The world a much safer place … for whom?
I’m sorry that it had to be done, but I don’t think any lesser demonstration would have been effective, given the Japanese mindset of the time.
Interestingly, both Hirohito in 1975 and the soon-to-be-former Defense Minister of Japan in 2007 said the exact same thing —
Truman’s mistake was not taking the bomb against Stalin and Mao while he had the chance
Curious thesis, but lacking any understanding of the dynamics of global war.
Now, clearly, one a-bomb dropped on Mao’s fat head would have prevented the really murderous history of China 1950-1980, but it is difficult to predict who exactly would emerge, and how happy they would be with the new status quo, and whether the replacement would be any improvement.
Russia is something of a similar story. I think the Russians emerged from WW2 confident in Communism — their Red Army had beaten the Germans, the first national army since Napoleon’s to do so — and forward-looking to the bright prospect of rebuilding their country and enjoying the spoils of war.
Your kind of thinking was what prompted W’s braintrust to take out Saddam without thinking through the aftermath. First Moqtada popped his greasy head up and found a following, then the Secular Shia we thought could run the place for us got ran out of the Green Zone by radicals, then there was a three-way civil war, then block-by-block ethnic cleansing, then . . .
I saw a quote today that I liked, “We should lead by the power of our example, not the example of our power”.
Actually, Russian peasants polled by the Allies after WWII strongly supported using the A-Bomb on Stalin, if that was the only way to take him out. Don’t forget, Stalin’s agricultural “reforms” had already killed several million of them by this time. Urban citizens would probably have been less supportive (especially if they were living where a bomb was to be dropped…), but I think the US could have done it and easily kept the World’ respect, given Stalin’s history. I’ll bet the Poles and Hungarians would have been grateful too.
>Russian peasants polled by the Allies after WWII
What a load of crap.
>I think the US could have done it and easily kept the World’ respect, given Stalin’s history
You think a lot of bizarre things. And miss the point a lot, too.
Don’t forget, Stalin’s agricultural “reforms” had already killed several million of them by this time
It’s hard to remember something that didn’t happen. The Collectivization famines were largely identical with the Ukrainian Holodomor, with some bleed over into the Lower Volga, Caucasus, and Kazakh regions of the Soviet Union — none of these areas populated by these “Russian peasants” allegedly desiring Stalin’s forcible removal by the Allies in the postwar period.
At any rate, the oppressed Russians *got* Stalin’s removal in 1953, as he managed to outlast the Truman administration by not much more than a month.
Fat lot of good Stalin’s “removal” did for the Poles, Hungarians, Czechs, and other victims behind the Iron Curtain, or for the Russians themselves for that matter.
To believe that a continuation of WW2 with a nuclear strike on “Stalin” would have improved things for Russians and Eastern Europe in general is certainly a prime example of right wing insanity. You guys are so far removed from reality it’s really hard discussing things with you.
“What a load of crap.”
Really? From Wikipedia (“Farm Collectivization”):
“In 1932-1933, an estimated 3.1–7 million people, mainly in Ukraine, died from famine after Stalin forced the peasants into the collectives (this famine is known in Ukraine as Holodomor). Most modern historians believe that this famine was caused by the sudden disruption of production brought on by collective farming policies and mass seizure of property”
And that doesn’t even count the millions killed or sent to Siberia in the *process* of collectivization.
So yes, I think a lot of farmers in the USSR and Ukraine might have had a bit of grudge against Stalin, even a whole 12 years later.
But Stalin was on the Left politically, which cuts him a break, I guess, with you. Otherwise, I don’t have a clue why you’d consider him any better than Hitler.
As poorly planned as it was, I don’t think the Soviet transition of power in 1953 was as destructive to communism as a nuclear strike would have been. To compare the two is just silly.
Yes, I think that destroying communism 40 years before Reagan did it would have benefited the Russians and Eastern Europeans.
But Stalin was on the Left politically, which cuts him a break, I guess, with you. Otherwise, I don’t have a clue why you’d consider him any better than Hitler.
Way to, yet again, miss the point, Geoff.
I pointed this from you:
“Russian peasants polled by the Allies after WWII”
was a load of crap, not their alleged unhappiness with Soviet rule.
I can only note you failed to provide any cite of your assertion that the Allies were performing opinion polls in the Russian countryside after WW2. The image itself is humorous in its complete ignorance of the realities of the postwar situation, and I will be utterly stunned if such a thing actually occurred.
As for Stalin, you seem to be laboring under the unfortunate misapprehension that leftists — aka social democrats — like myself have any love for the mass-murdering sh–head, or the overall over-centralized, over-militarized, and over-theorized Soviet system for that matter.
My larger point WRT Stalin and the postwar Soviet state was that I think the Russians on the whole were largely behind it and optimistic about the future in the postwar.
Uncle Joe was there for the Russians during their dark days and he and the Party benefitted from saving the very Russian nation from the Nazi invaders.
The Communists’ victims in Eastern Europe, not so much, but that’s the way the Russian Empire rolled before the Revolution, and if you were up on current events you might know now that there’s still not much love lost between eg. the Ukrainians and Russians.
As poorly planned as it was, I don’t think the Soviet transition of power in 1953 was as destructive to communism as a nuclear strike would have been. To compare the two is just silly.
Christ, your the densest mofo I’ve encountered on the internet, and that’s saying something.
I can’t even parse that into an intelligent thought. What are you trying to say here?
Yes, I think that destroying communism 40 years before Reagan did it would have benefited the Russians and Eastern Europeans.
Yes, I get it, you’d like to destroy Communism in the 1940s. Wouldn’t we all. The difficulty was that Communism was more than Stalin or Stalinism. You’d also have the Red Army to deal with.
This blindness to the realities and limits of power is, like I said, the same blindness that led us into the colossal mistake of taking out Saddam.
One viewpoint, that is somewhat cynical but has some truth to it, is that Stalin and Saddam weren’t causes of systematic totalitarianism, rather, they were effects, that the instabilities of their societies produced these powers.
“Christ, your the densest mofo I’ve encountered on the internet, and that’s saying something.
I can’t even parse that into an intelligent thought. What are you trying to say here?”
Ad hominum attack much lately? You say in your post above, that Stalin was removed in 1953. Sure, that was a good thing, but it did nothing to take out communism in the USSR. Which a nuclear strike would have done. And the Red Army was in no shape in 1945 to oppose Americans with nuclear weapons.
Maybe attacking Russia would have been a disaster. Maybe it would have worked out well, as the defeat of Japan did. It wasn’t done, and the opportunity was missed, so we’ll never know. Of course, that doesn’t stop *you* from making absolute pronouncements on the subject.
[quietly walking away…]
Which a nuclear strike would have done
Maybe attacking Russia would have been a disaster.
When you contradict yourself within two sentences, you should revisit your thinking on the subject.
Sorry Luis, for extending the derailment of your discussion on Hiroshima.
There is a difference between the Spanish anti-Semitism in the XVI century and that of the Germans in the XX. The Spaniards had a problem with the Jewish religion -or any other religion that was not Catholicism- not with being Jewish. You can change your religion, but not your family tree. The same is the case between Stalin and Hitler. It was not Stalin’s philosophy to eradicate from the face of the earth any population group for their ethnicity: only those he perceived as a threat to his utopia. Which, of course, it is bad enough -but no doubt he would have kept Einstein.
Well, yes: the reference to the Wikipedia is somewhat hilarious.
“…you should revisit…extending…your discussion on Hiroshima”
Thanks! I will…
Seriously, if you’re going to try to refute someone’s arguments, selective quotation is a bad way to do it.
Troy: No, please, do go ahead… I was just trying to express a kind of subtle respect for the level of, well, shall we say “passion” the discussion had taken on. ☺
The funny thing is that this idea that nuking Moscow or whatever would result in the abandonment of Communist Party totalitarianism does in fact circle around to the discussion about the Japanese and WW2, in an alternate situation where the war hadn’t had gone so swimmingly for us but we managed to “take out” Hirohito and the top leadership via nuke in August 1945 regardless.
I don’t think a single Japanese soldier would have surrendered in that alternative past and the Japanese would have in fact fought to the last man, woman, and child.
Here in the real world, the Japanese were promised in 1937 that their war in China would be over in six months, that the war with the ABCD powers would be over, or at least deadlocked, in a year of tough fighting to expand and consolidate their outer defense perimeter from the Aleutians to the Andaman Islands. Instead, we beat them (as far as they knew) fair and square on the sea, air and land. (It wasn’t quite fair since we had broken into many of their codes and repeatedly took advantage of foreknowledge of their plans). The military had been proven utterly incapable of living up to their promises or executing their plans, outside of China at least.
Somehow I think it was this brutal toe-to-toe fight in the Pacific, all the sea battles, all the desperate hand-to-hand combat on formerly unknown atolls, that gave the Americans additional moral cover to begin targeting the Japanese people directly.
Perhaps this wasn’t necessary, perhaps the Japanese military’s willingness to target Chinese civilians so brutally gave us the opportunity and cover to sink to their level.
But I think the argument that the bombs were necessary, but not sufficient, to bring Japanese military to surrender completely is important. In 1945 the government was willing to surrender but the military still had fight in them. Even after the bombings this was still the case, but the entry of Russia and their overpowering attack in Manchuria finally broke the will of the militarists to continue their fight.
Perhaps, in retrospect, it would have been better for us to wait a week and see what the Russian entry into the war would have accomplished. Perhaps the nukes would not have been necessary at all.
Of course, in this alternative, nukes don’t acquire the mass slaughter stigma and perhaps would have been employed on the battlefield, quite possibly in Korea, or when some pretty whacky dudes (eg Lemnitzer) were running the Pentagon in the late 50s and early 60s.
if you’re going to try to refute someone’s arguments, selective quotation is a bad way to do it.
Look, I pointed out where you said two contradictory things, the first being that nuking Stalin would take out communism, and then two sentences later allowing that attacking Russia might have been a disaster for us.
Nuking Stalin/ the Russians / ??? in the postwar in the off chance that a better government would form is pretty far out there. ‘course, it’s part of the Bircher wing of Republican/conservative thought, or what passes for it, so no surprises really that you’re dumping this into Luis’ comment section.
The Nagasaki bombing came after an immense 3 1/2 year struggle. It had a terrible moral logic to it that even Hirohito acknowledged, both in 1945 in the immediate aftermath, and also thirty years later.
Nuking Moscow as the Cold War gathered steam, on the other hand, is sheer adventurism, on the order of dropping a SEAL team into downtown Pyongyang to really f– them up.
Sounds great if you’re a lunatic, but people in the reality-based community like me can only shake their head and roll their eyes at such untethered thinking.
In the 2nd half of the sentence than you chopped, I said that attacking Russia might also have gone very well for us. It’s really impossible to say at this point in time. And of course, any kind of combat is partly a speculative venture. Few people thought Vietnam would put up much of a fight against the power of the US Military. But in deep jungle, in a conventional-only war, they did very well (abetted, to be sure, by some bad political decisions in Washington). But the Russians were in far worse shape than the US in 1945 and Nukes would have been a huge advantage at that time.
The US mostly entered the European side of WWII for moral reasons. You don’t see any “moral logic” to freeing Eastern Europe and ending communism? Some Russians would oppose the change. Some Germans also liked the Nazi party. It wouldn’t matter if they lost.
You call it “adventurism”. I would call it self-interest in eliminating a dangerous soon-to-be enemy.
Your solution to the problem of communism seems to be “do nothing”. As Edmund Burke put it, “All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do…” what you advise.
In the 2nd half of the sentence than you chopped, I said that attacking Russia might also have gone very well for us.
This conditionality was not present in the original statement:
“it did nothing to take out communism in the USSR. Which a nuclear strike would have done.”
“Would have done” — you were equating a preemptive nuclear attack on Stalin/Russia/Whatever to “taking out communism”.
This betrays an utter underestimation of the attachment of the Russian people to their system of government in the postwar era, unless you envision some sort of genocidal campaign against the Russians that even the surviving Nazis would have blanched at.
The US mostly entered the European side of WWII for moral reasons.
Well, that and Hitler declaring war on the United States on December 11, 1941.
You don’t see any “moral logic” to freeing Eastern Europe and ending communism? Some Russians would oppose the change. Some Germans also liked the Nazi party. It wouldn’t matter if they lost.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFEiSNMcARU#t=2m07s
Your solution to the problem of communism seems to be “do nothing”.
yup, because as implemented by the Soviets (and Red Chinese) it was a bullshit totalitarian system and will always fail from its own stupidities in time. And events proved me right, 1989-91.
You’re the one who has the great faith in Communism, that it can survive and hold onto power. Even in back in the 80s I knew it was a crock and just the positive contrast of our relative wealth (and more importantly freedoms) — what is now called “soft power” — to what they enjoyed would win the day in the end.
By initiating conflict without a clear casus belli one just f—s things up, often irretrievably. War is not a board game that you can put away when you are losing, and just taking out Stalin by detonating a nuclear device in his general vicinity would not have been enough to decapitate the Soviet state.