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Related: http://www.doug-long.com/einstein.htm

http://www.doug-long.com/hiroshim.htm

GP is entirely correct, though I'm shocked that (s)he hasn't been modded to hell because of it. Well, to be technical, nobody can claim to know the true motive for dropping The Bomb, only that the stated reason was without a doubt bullshit. That the motive to to keep away/send a message to the Soviet Union is the only reasonable explanation anyone's come up with but, as far as I know, there's no hard evidence for it.

two fried cities were substituted for the years of war that had been expected to be necessary to end the Japan part of WWII

• "During the days before that fateful August 6, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur learned that Japan had asked Russia to negotiate a surrender. "We expected acceptance of the Japanese surrender daily," one of his staff members recalled."
• "The bomb had not been necessary either to end the war quickly or to avoid an invasion of the Japanese home islands; morever, 'Truman and his advisers knew it.'"
• "It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon 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." (as stated by Dwight Eisenhower)
• "From April to August 1945 the Japanese made a number of official attempts to secure a negotiated peace settlement and an end to the war."

"The weapon is to be used against Japan between now and August 10th. I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children. Even if the Japs are savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic, we as the leader of the world for the common welfare cannot drop this terrible bomb on the old capital or the new [Kyoto or Tokyo].
...
He [Stimson] and I are in accord. The target will be a purely military one and we will issue a warning statement [known as the Potsdam Proclamation] asking the Japs to surrender and save lives. I'm sure they will not do that, but we will have given them the chance. It is certainly a good thing for the world that Hitler's crowd or Stalin's did not discover this atomic bomb. It seems to be the most terrible thing ever discovered, but it can be made the most useful."

[7/26/45: The U.S., Great Britain, and China issued the Potsdam Proclamation, which called for Japan's "unconditional surrender". It made no reference to the future status of the Emperor, Russia's secret agreement to declare war on Japan, or the atomic bomb. It was rejected by Japan's Prime Minister Suzuki.]

Bombs dropped.

[8/10/45: Japan makes surrender offer to Allies.]

[8/10/45: Having received reports and photographs of the effects of the Hiroshima bomb, Truman ordered a halt to further atomic bombings. Sec. of Commerce Henry Wallace recorded in his diary on the 10th, "Truman said he had given orders to stop atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn't like the idea of killing, as he said, 'all those kids'." (John Blum, ed., "The Price of Vision: the Diary of Henry A. Wallace, 1942-1946", pg. 473-474).]

For one, he didn't expect it to kill as many civilians. Second, they offered the Japanese surrender prior to this. The Japanese REFUSED. That was the whole problem, they were defeated yet still refused to end the war, even if they couldn't win. Which just reinforced the prior intel that Japan would fight to the last child before surrendering.

The bomb was necessary. Truman didn't have the results of the first bomb until the 10th, well after the second bomb was dropped. This wasn't an age of the internet where he received information instantly, it took DAYS to get photographs from Japan to the President. The times were different, and you seem to be harboring an overly emotional grudge in the present times over it. You weren't there, and don't have the perspective of the times.

Since you feel "justified" in your anger because your family was involved, perhaps I should be equally angry that you and your ancestors brutally attacked my great-uncle and killed him on Dec 7th, 1941? Would that really be reasonable?

For the record, I've come to love and appreciate the Japanese culture. That still doesn't change that they killed my family, but you guys paid for it in the end. Let it go.

1. So my initial statement was exactly true.

2 & 3. Whether the nukes were needed is a matter of opinion and speculation. Personally I think the evidence says they weren't needed, but that changes nothing and is still just an opionion. There is no reason to discuss these points further. My original statements are still exactly true.

4. The ONLY reason we don't have nuclear bunker busters being used in Iraq right now is because there is still enough collective brain power in congress to keep Bush and his chosen idiots in check. Period. So yes, the checks and balances worked. But that doesn't mean our wanna-be dictator is any less dangerous than Iran's dictator.

However, NONE of what you said explains why the same rules that apply to them shouldn't apply to us. Yes, Iran and North Korea are dangerous now and would be more so with nukes. We are clearly more dangerous with a nuclear aresenal as well.

The fact of that matter is, no country needs nuclear weapons, and almost every country need nuclear power.

It is ludicrous for the U.S. to play Nuclear Police and thumb its nose at the rest of the world when it serves no ones purpose but ours, and in the long run is bad for us, not good.

It would be far better, in every way, for there to be a governing body (yes, it would probably need to run by the U.N., as much as I dislike the U.N.) and for there to be a specific set of guidelines governing the development and use of nuclear energy, and the complete removal from the planet of nuclear weapons.

Just as much as I can't say that the bombing of Hiroshima wasn't necessary to avoid an invasion of Japan, you cannot say that using the bomb saved allied lives by making an invasion unnecessary.

MAYBE if the Americans decided to allow the Japanese to keep their emperor before they dropped the bomb, and not after they dropped the bomb, things would have been different.

Notice the 'maybe', no one knows!

For a good read on the subject, look here: http://www.doug-long.com/hiroshim.htm

Ah, the old "think of the children" rouse.

No matter how often you say it, it still doesn't make it true.

The argument that it save a million lives has been refuted time and time again. First of all the casualty figures are far from certain and it's far from certain that these were indeed that casulty figures the US had to expect had an invasion taken place.
Further, there are rather strong arguments for the assumption that Japane would have surrendered without an invasion and without the use of atomic bombs.
Finally, you discard all the eveidence that has been brougth to light by historians that suggests that the US did indeed have at least some additional reasons for using the atomic bombs, namely the begining confrontation with the Soviet Union.

Just one quote for you:

""...in [July] 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. ...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.

"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. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."

- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380

In a Newsweek interview, Eisenhower again recalled the meeting with Stimson:

"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."

- Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63 "
http://www.doug-long.com/quotes.htm

Finally:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hi roshima_and_Nagasaki
How about going there and learn yourself...

The history books I've read have a slightly different take on things. Not everyone agrees the bombing was a necessary thing. Japan was already in the middle of negotiating a surrender. The bombs were dropped at least partially to force surrender before the Russians could be involved.

Look at the quotes from men who were involved:

"P.M. [Churchill} & I ate alone. Discussed Manhattan (it is a success). Decided to tell Stalin about it. Stalin had told P.M. of telegram from Jap Emperor asking for peace." -President Harry S. Truman

"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." -Dwight Eisenhower

I'm amazed no one has posted a challenge to this assertion. Few historians accept this justification of history's worst act of terror uncritically. The Japanese were trying to surrender anyway.

This article is a good starting point for anyone interested in the facts of the matter.

But, nobody knows for sure what would have happened without the Bomb. The only thing we know for sure is that it brought about a swift end to the war.

I am no historian, and am certainly not familiar enough with the details of WWII to argue your points directly. But perhaps you would be willing to see what others have said in counter-argument?

The positions taken by Doug Long in an article Hiroshima: Was It Necessary? (there is also a summary), and the arguments given by Gar Alperovit on a mailing list, also collected on Doug Long's site, seem to have the weight of evidence behind them. Their case seems very plausible.

This site came up with a quick google search; I was unaware of it when I posted the earlier comment.

I am no historian, and am certainly not familiar enough with the details of WWII to argue your points directly. But perhaps you would be willing to see what others have said in counter-argument?

The positions taken by Doug Long in an article Hiroshima: Was It Necessary? (there is also a summary), and the arguments given by Gar Alperovit on a mailing list, also collected on Doug Long's site, seem to have the weight of evidence behind them. Their case seems very plausible.

This site came up with a quick google search; I was unaware of it when I posted the earlier comment.

I am no historian, and am certainly not familiar enough with the details of WWII to argue your points directly. But perhaps you would be willing to see what others have said in counter-argument?

The positions taken by Doug Long in an article Hiroshima: Was It Necessary? (there is also a summary), and the arguments given by Gar Alperovit on a mailing list, also collected on Doug Long's site, seem to have the weight of evidence behind them. Their case seems very plausible.

This site came up with a quick google search; I was unaware of it when I posted the earlier comment.

Some certainly claim there is such evidence, such as the collection of quotes at this site. In particular have a look at the section under Ellis Zacharias, Deputy Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence.

Quoting one segment here,

On July 25th, the U.S. intercepted a secret transmission from Japan's Foreign Minister (Togo) to their Ambassador to Moscow (Sato), who was trying to set up a meeting with the Soviets to negotiate an end to the war. The message referred to the Zacharias broadcast and stated:

"...special attention should be paid to the fact that at this time the United States referred to the Atlantic Charter. As for Japan, it is impossible to accept unconditional surrender under any circumstances, but we should like to communicate to the other party through appropriate channels that we have no objection to a peace based on the Atlantic Charter."

U.S. Dept. of State, Foreign Relations of the United States: Conference of Berlin (Potsdam) 1945, vol. 2, pg. 1260-1261.

Imagine what the DOD will do with this little robot. You guys are like Einstein and his Atomic Bomb .
Let someone else do the killing, we'll just build the bot so innocently ;-)
"But bombs were not what Einstein had in mind when he published this equation.
Indeed, he considered himself to be a pacifist. In 1929, he publicly declared that
if a war broke out he would "unconditionally refuse to do war service, direct or
indirect... regardless of how the cause of the war should be judged."
(Ronald Clark, "Einstein: The Life and Times", pg. 428).
His position would change in 1933, as the result of Adolf Hitler's ascent to power in Germany. While still promoting peace, Einstein no longer fit his previous self-description of being an "absolute pacifist". "

~~~DWIGHT EISENHOWER "...in [July] 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. ...the Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.

"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. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."

- Dwight Eisenhower, Mandate For Change, pg. 380

In a Newsweek interview, Eisenhower again recalled the meeting with Stimson:

"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing."

- Ike on Ike, Newsweek, 11/11/63

~~~ADMIRAL WILLIAM D. LEAHY (Chief of Staff to Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman) "It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon 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."

- William Leahy, I Was There, pg. 441.

~~~GENERAL DOUGLAS MacARTHUR MacArthur biographer William Manchester has described MacArthur's reaction to the issuance by the Allies of the Potsdam Proclamation to Japan: "...the Potsdam declaration in July, demand[ed] that Japan surrender unconditionally or face 'prompt and utter destruction.' MacArthur was appalled. He knew that the Japanese would never renounce their emperor, and that without him an orderly transition to peace would be impossible anyhow, because his people would never submit to Allied occupation unless he ordered it. Ironically, when the surrender did come, it was conditional, and the condition was a continuation of the imperial reign. Had the General's advice been followed, the resort to atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been unnecessary."

William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, pg. 512.

Norman Cousins was a consultant to General MacArthur during the American occupation of Japan. Cousins writes of his conversations with MacArthur, "MacArthur's views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed." He continues, "When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor."

Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, pg. 65, 70-71.

Not that the atom bomb was a particularly novel idea, what with the fact that the Allies had seen the use of firestorms both in Japan and European cities like Dresden. it was merely a way to create a similar level of destruction with just one bomb.

If you read the page you linked to carefully, you'll see that this is the sequence:

On July 12, 1939, Szilard and Wigner meet with Einstein in Peconic, Einstein dictates to Wigner (in German) a letter to the Belgian ambassador.

Shortly thereafter, Szilard met with Alexander Sachs, an unofficial adviser to the President. He agreed to carry a letter from Einstein to FDR, if Szilard could get one.

Szilard wrote a four-page draft version of this letter, and mailed it to Einstein.

Einstein asked to meet again with Szilard in person to discuss the letter, and so on July 30, 1939--this time with Edward Teller as chauffeur--Szilard travels out to Peconic a second time.

Einstein felt that Szilard's version was too long and technical for the President, and dictated (again, in German) a shorter version to Szilard.

Szilard spent a few days translating Einstein's letter into English, and even produced an even more shortened version. He took both to Einstein; Einstein signed both but preffered the longer of the two.

Szilard gave the longer letter to Sachs to take to FDR.

Sachs was not able to meet with FDR until October 11, 1939.

Here is one summary account of that meeting (an account which corresponds with my memory of its description in Rhodes's book--probably the source for this one):

" When Sachs met with the president, he spent the better part of an hour going through the physics involved in splitting the atom, then handed Roosevelt the Einstein letter with a cover note from Szilard. Unfortunately, after an hour Roosevelt was losing interest and questioned whether further costly research was appropriate for government funding. The audience was clearly at an end, but FDR invited Sachs to return the next morning for breakfast.

Imagine the night Sachs spent at the Carlton Hotel on Oct. 11! He had that afternoon failed to engage Roosevelt's interest in a project that he and Szilard and Einstein felt was essential if Hitler was not to win the war and conquer the world. He knew he had one more shot to convince FDR that the government should fund the research, or all of Szilard's work and the effect of the Einstein letter would go down the drain. Hitler would have an atomic bomb, and there would be no one with the wherewithal to contest the Nazis. And now it all came down to his breakfast meeting with Roosevelt.

The next morning, Sachs took a different tack, as Roosevelt asked him, "What bright idea do you have this morning?"

Sachs reminded Roosevelt of Napoleon's foolish refusal to underwrite Robert Fulton's experimental submarine, an invention that might have won the battle of Trafalgar for the French if Napoleon had had more faith in it. He also quoted the scientist Francis Aston's concern that a device powered by subatomic energy might allow one nation's leader to blow up his neighbor. "Alex," Roosevelt responded, "what you are after is to see that the Nazis don't blow us up."

"Precisely," Sachs responded.

That turned out to be enough. By 1945 the government was to spend $2 billion building the bomb. After 1945 most of the scientists involved (especially Leo Szilard) were to spend the rest of their lives trying to get the genie back into the bottle.

So, none of this was Einstein's initiative. Szilard wrote the first version of the letter that Einstein was to send to FDR. Einstein rewrote it by dictating a new version of Szilard; then Szilard himself translated that into two versions which he took back to Einstein to sign. Sachs met with the President, but didn't present Einstein's letter until the end of the meeting, by then FDR was bored and not paying attention. Sachs met with FDR again the next day, this time convincing FDR to support an atomic program. There's not much evidence that Einstein's letter was particularly influential in this discussion. All evidence indicates that it was Sachs himself was who was persuasive. And, even then, the initial support was still very tepid.

In retrospect, I shouldn't have posted a simple "Why?" in response to the story, since doing so was a little bit coy and sort of an entrapment. But I partly did it because I was trying to be cautious about assuming why people so strongly associate Einstein with the bomb. Some people, for example, argue that he's in some sense the "father" of the bomb because of "e=mc^2".

But I've always thought that his importance to the development of the bomb was greatly overestimated in popular imagination. I imagine that a lot of people, uninformed about physics, just assume that the greatest physicist they're familiar with must be responsible in some way for the bomb. Others that are more knowledgable probably believe that he was intimately familiar with the work on atomic theory and the possibility of the bomb and took it upon himself to write FDR that letter and thus made the whole thing happen with his enormous influence. But that's not the way that it happened.

There are a few people that really were crucial to getting the ball rolling. The first and foremost is Szilard, who, if anyone, is the appropriate person to have his photo associated with this story. The two civilians are probably Vannevar Bush and James Conant (and possibly Sachs for his one crucial meeting with FDR). The former three worked tirelessly for years trying to get the US involved in atomic research, and then were instrumental after it began.

...Forget which ones, though. Anyone remember names?

You are probably thinking of Leo Szilard . Here is another brief biography . Szilard gave up Physics after the war.

Szilard's circulated a petition a couple of weeks before the bomb was dropped on Japan, urging the President not to drop it on Japanese cities. 69 of his Manhattan project colleagues chose to sign it with him. The link to the petition above lists the co-signers. The only other name I recognized was Eugene Wigner.

Wigner, Teller and Szilard -- three Hungarian emigres -- went to Einstein to get him to write Roosevelt the letter credited with getting the the Manhattan Project created. I have read that Einstein dictated the letter to his old friend Szilard. I have read that Szilard drafted the letter, and brought it for Einstein's signature.