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60 Years Since Hiroshima
cryptoz writes "Today is the 6th of August, 2005, exactly 60 years after the first nuclear device was used in a war. Japan remembers what happened, as do those around the world. Elswhere, we remember where the bomb hit, as well as how it worked." From the article about Japan's observation of the anniversary: "The anniversary comes as regional powers meet in Beijing to urge North Korea to give up its nuclear programme, seen by Tokyo as a threat and one of the reasons behind rising calls in Japan to strengthen its defence and seek closer military ties with the United States. Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi was among those attending the ceremony in Hiroshima, 690 km (430 miles) southwest of Tokyo." We've previously reported on the anniversary of the first nuclear explosion.
I think its extremely important that we remember these events, to ensure that the situations and attitudes that led to them can be remembered and the contribution of people who died on both sides to bringing the world to the way it is today. We can't change the past, but we can try to avoid the same situations and circumstances. A generation now are being raised where full scale war between first world countries is a thing of the past, and its important that they can come to respect the happenings of the past.
Business Voyeur
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_pr eview.asp?idArticle=5894&R=C62A29C91
This is a wonderful article from the Weekly Standard concerning Truman's choice.
The most salient fact? About 10,000 people per day were dying per day in the Pacific theatre, mostly civilians in Japanese-occupied countries. Any alternative to the bombs that would have caused a one month delay would have wound up with more dead than the bombs themselves.
Remember this before you rattle off about some alternative scheme to end the war.
1) more people died previously in (single) conventional bomb strikes (firebombings);
2) Japan had, at that point, lost control of air and sea (over and around) their nation;
3) Japan was starving it's people and urging them to prepare for "millions of honorable deaths";
4) The Emperor wanted to surrender, but the Japanese military leadership refused to allow it;
5) Japan was warned repeatedly by the USA that refusing to surrender would exact a terrible toll;
6) Japan was seriously dragging their heels, taking weeks to decide, preparing for a defensive land war.
Finally, the US ended the stalemate, without a gruesome land war.
No one in the USA wanted to fight an "Iwo Jima" style battle, one in which hundreds of lives were lost just gaining or losing a couple of yards.
Fought on their home islands, the Japanese would have fought terribly, to the last man woman or child, with hundreds of thousands of lives lost on each side to starvation or this hellish land war.
The bomb, in many ways, was a gift for both sides.
This is a great /. article!
I get to spot people with disgusting attitudes like this and mark them 'foe'!
Thanks for standing out in the crowd!
Most of the people who died as a result of being nuked by 'The Americans' were not 'The Japanese' who commited the atrocities.
Grow up.
In the free world the media isn't government run; the government is media run.
Last I checked, most of the Americans being pillored as evil for dropping the bomb weren't even alive at the time.
"Learning is not compulsory... neither is survival."
--Dr.W.Edwards Deming
I already know that there's going to be people arguing back and forth that a) Hiroshima was a tragedy that never should have happened, or b) Hiroshima was necessary because it ended the war/punished the Japanese/etc.
Well, you know what? I don't care about either of those perspectives. Maybe it was necessary, maybe it wasn't, it's history now, and let's treat it as such. But there's one thing about the bomb that nobody in the US seems to realize:
Any country, *any* country, that uses nuclear weapons against another country had better let it weigh on their soul for as long as that country exists. The discussion should be constant, and permanent, and without end. The empathy of the pain that the Japanese people went through should be part and parcel of every conversation about World War II. People should go to sleep every night knowing exactly how serious of a decision that was.
And that's the problem: For every other country whose government's have committed mass murder, whether justifiable or not, there is a sense of history, of ownership of the bad as well as the good, there is a conceivability that they are as much responsible for the past as they are for the present and future.
In the US, we don't have that sense. It's all abstract and textbook, it's all justifications and wartime terminoligy. It's all disconnected and abstracted to the point of science fiction.
So argue all you want about whether it was right, or wrong, or good, or bad, or justifiable, or unjustifiable. To me, I can understand both sides of that debate.
What I can't understand is how most Americans seem to care much about what it means that we sent two Japenese cities into a nuclear hell. Using the bomb was a horrible act, whether or not it was justifiable, and the real tragedy is that the Japanese people were forced to understand that, while we read the headlines, added some notes to the next year's schoolbooks, and then continued on with our lives.
Utter propaganda developed by the United States for it's own benefit.
Take a look at the scholarly work on the subject. Japan was ready to surrender, they had offered conditional surrender before the bombs were dropped. Of course that was rejected, and no doubt should have been for strategic reasons.
US military officials agreed that Japan was close to surrender, and it's military capability was almost entirely destroyed in the fire-bombings that took place before Hiroshima/Nagasaki. The military dictatorship that influenced and basically forced the Emperor to support it and their ideals has already collapsed under the shame from their losses and failure to defend Japan. Take a look at the 1946 Bombing Survey for more info. Japan was not a significant military threat at the time. Howard Zinn's "A People's History of the United States" is a good starting point. Though if you think he's biased you can find the same referenced info elsewhere. Military officials were clear that Japan was not a great threat anymore. Marshall councilled against using the bomb on civilian populations, as did most other advisors and the creators of the weapons.
No evidence backs up the claim that anywhere from half a million, to a million US lives would be required to take Japan. No data at all supports that, indeed the numbers seem to be drawn out of thin air. There is no accurate measurement of how many lives would be needed to take Japan, especially as many suggest that Japan was close to surrender, had little military might, and might not even need to be invaded at all.
It is clear that Truman lied to the American people when he notified them on the bombing of Japan with nuclear weapons. "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."
Hiroshima was not a "military base". The aim of dropping the bomb was not to hasten Japanese defeat in order to spare US lives, but rather as a strategic move to check Stalin. Stalin was to declare war on Japan and join in any possible invasion. The US did not want to face another East/West Germany situation, with a possible unfriendly government in the region. Instead they wished to have influence in the region, and to show military might. Taking the first step in the Cold War meant that they had to make a show of power, and dropping the Bomb was that step. It showed the region, Stalin, and the world at large that they were in control. An impressive step was needed to assert this power, and indeed Truman no doubt felt that by asserting US authority and making a power play he could prevent the US from having to fight more wars in the future and scede power to unfriendly governments.
So your point is entirely falacious. Often repeated and held as truth in schools and blindly pro-US people, but there is no factual evidence to support it. Please take a look at all the scholarly work on the subject. It is so one-sided as to be ridiculous. Bombing Japan in order to save hundreds of thousands of US lives is a story without any merit at all.
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The problem was this was during a time of carpet bombing. There were no smart bombs. Planes would fly over and just drop bombs over everybody. Also, Japan would NOT give up.. it took -TWO- atomic bombs to get them to give up. Without them the war probably would have went on for a LOT longer. This probably would have created more deaths/casualties on both sides in the long run.
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and feel fine about the stuff they should feel guilty over.
If truman had the atomic bomb and reasonably believed using this weapon would end the war and would save a million lives he had a DUTY to use it even if the civilian cost was terrible.
If the critics can play monday morning quarterback then so can I. The use of the atomic bomb in the real world as opposed to just tests allowed the world to see how horrible it was and so far has ensured only two have been used in the last 60 years.
If Americans want to feel guilty over something, feel guilty about your SUV's helping to fund terrorism through oil money. we should feel guilty that we have allowed our constitution to be gutted in the name of safety. We should feel guilty that we sent american soldiers over to die in iraq without demanding verifiable proof from their commander in chief for the reasons for going. Theres plenty of things we can feel guilty about without accepting undesserved blame
I'm basically convinced that we wanted to study the effects on real targets, and also implicitly threaten Stalin, and those factors were used to justify the targeting. We hated the Japanese enough to consider their use as human Guinnea pigs to be a trivial aspect.
Not sure how to file this aspect, though it's surely not amusing, but we might well have killed more Japanese and learned more about nuclear war by "humanely" hitting Mount Fuji first. A low-level blast planned to create the maximum visual scarring of Mount Fuji would have also kicked up an enormous amount of fallout, and the long-term fatalities would probably have been very high, though the immediate deaths would have been reduced. Of course, part of our ignorance at that time included ignorance of radiation sickness and fallout.
However, looking at the state of the world today, it doesn't seem like we learned much by it. At least nothing important.
By the way, I've lived in Japan for many years. On a clear day, I can see Mount Fuji from my train station.
Freedom = (Meaningful - Coerced) Choice != (Speech | Beer^2), and sad sock puppets' bad mods avail them naught.
Using them the first time is the hardest; it's easier to do it again.
I'd say you've got that backwards.
The first time, with the two explosions in Japan, was the easiest. It was only afterwards that using them became an unforgivable crime in the eyes of the world.
This is a wildly different situation for many reasons, not the least of which is that "arabs" do not compose a nation which declare war as a whole.
Your analogy might be apt if all of asia were has been engaged in guerilla war with the US, but in fact, the Japanese were busy slaughtering their neighboring asian nations at the same time they were fighting us.
Also, this ignores the factors of Israel and its dependence upon US assistance to defend itself, as well as the fact that Saddam invited the second most recent major war between the US and iraq by invading, his rich but relatively defenseless neighbor.
The Japs knew they well 'n truelly beat by Saipan (just read any of the Japanese War ministry papers that were released about 10 years ago), gez by then their war production wasn't even replacing loses by 15% or something, let alone matching war loses, or matching the allies. Even us Aussies alone were almost matching the Japanese in many aspects of war production by then (of course that excludes such things as capital ships 'n subs. Mind you by the last year of the war Japanese aircraft production was abysmal, while such aircraft as Beaufighters, Mustangs & Mosquitoes were being made in Oz). The Japanese only kept fighting because unconditional surrender was unacceptable (which is why unconditional surrender's so rare) as they saw it as a risk to their monarchy.
Actually, the Japs knew they were beat by Midway - they knew the realities of US industrial production (the fact that only 17% of America's war effort was directed at Japan, yet the Americans were more than matching them. These figures become even more spectacular when one realises that Germany was directing arguably 80+% of it's war effort against the Russians) meant they had to force the US to meet it's terms with 6 months of Pearl Harbour or the war was lost. A such Japan had no intention of ever invading Australia, India or the US - their plan was to run amoke, quickly inflicting a number of knockout blows, there-by forcing the allies to accept their terms for peace - recognise the Japanese conquests in China & accept Japanese puppet regimes in the Philipines, Indochina, Malaya & the East Indies. (Going by a doco I saw) by Midway they had given up on the allies accepting terms on the puppet states & just wanted the China conquests recognised, which was still quite rightly unacceptable to the allies. By Saipan their hoped for terms were that the allies would be willing to accept some sort of Japanese hegamony/sphere in Formosa, Manchuria & Korea. By the fall of Germany the Japanese only had 2 conditions left - the monarchy must remain & on paper the surrender must be referred to as a 'negotiated ceasefire' (the Japanese obsession with 'face' is obvious here).
From what I understand the whole 'unconditional surrender' thing started as a policy of faith by Roosevelt & Churchill to Stalin. It became policy in regards to the Nazi regime as an attempt to relieve Stalin's concern/worries/paranoia about the West unilaterally negotiating terms with Hitler. The unconditional surrender policy was only extended to include the Japanese to satisfy American voters, who would otherwise ask 'why are the Germans expected to surrender unconditionally & not the Japs when it was the Japs that attacked us'.
Now lets see what some of America's great war-time leaders thought:-
GENERAL DOUGLAS MacARTHUR
There is nothing wrong with feeling empathy for those whose lives were harmed by this, regardless if they were on the "good" or "bad" side. They were still human.
There are always many pointless deaths of good people on either side of a war.
And that's one of the major reasons the US chose to drop it's two atomic bombs on Japan. The US was convinced that the Japanese would not surrender, at least under any terms the US found acceptable. They were further convinced (probably correctly) that a full scale invasion of Japan was cause an extreme number of casualites on both sides.
The hope, thus, was to convince Japan that they had a new irresistable superweapon. Every effort was made to give the impression that the US possessed a vast aresenal of these bombs, and that they'd just keep dropping them on cities until Japan surrendered unconditonally.
It was such an unprecidented amount of force that it was just totally shocking. Sure, cities were leveled all the time, but it took thousands of bombers with many bombs each to do it, and that's somethign fighter planes could mount a defence against. But here ONE plane with ONE bomb effectively leveled a city. No one had ever seen any power like it, and had the US been telling the truth (in reality those two bombs were all they had at the time), there could be no defence.
Then, of course, there were the after effects which were unknown before that. People who had survived the bomb unscathed, so it seemed, began dying from mysterious problems, later revealed to be from the radiation that was released. So the bomb didn't just kill when it was dropped, it kept on killing even afterwards.
I personally think it is an event to be remembered because it's a demonstration of just how dangerous nuclear weapons are. Those bombs are tame compared to what we have today, and the destruction they unleashed is amazing.
The decision to nuke Hiroshima was appropriate given the circumstances of war. For anyone who seems so 'horrified' at this atrocity, recall that the Japan and Germany initiated the war. Recall that Japan and Germany created a war against humanity with INDUSTRIAL genocide.
Recall that Germany was furiously working on the nuke - if things had been differently, London and Moscow would have been targeted.
Recall that millions of civillians and millitary personel were killed as part of the axis war plans .
I would have been angry if the allied powers had a means to immediately end the war, even at great civillian loss, and chose not to use it for fear of later slashdot-weenies whinning about being "nice" during a war.
I've been to the countries occupied by Japan during the 30s and 40s, and the people to this day go out of their way to say "thanks" for the US millitary efforts sixty years ago. Phillipines, China, Indonesia, Australia...
The only PT Boat Journal on the web: http://www.PT171.org
The 21 kiloton test (equal to Fat Man, the plutonium bomb dropped on Nagasaki, and the more powerfull of the two) that many have seen photos of (it was the one with US troops in slit trenches), was detonated at a range of 6 miles. All too many of these soldiers later died from this, which was a great tragedy. But it was from long-term effects. None were killed outright.
/. readers probably wouldn't be here (hard for an ancestor to spawn, if he's dead, after all) if it hadn't been done.
A detonation at 60 miles miles, or ten times that range, would have accomplished nothing. It would also have depleted a very small supply of fissionables, produced at enormous cost at Oak Ridge (uranium 235) and Hanford (plutonium).
Save the talk, ye who would say, "What, you're worrying about the cost, when so many lives were lost?" Yes, I am. The US didn't fire the first shot, no matter what YAN conspiracy nutjob (we didn't land on the moon, alien bodies at Area 51, the CIA blew up the Twin Towers, etc.). But we sure as *hell* fired the last shot. We paid a lot to do it, and it was worth it. It saved US lives. Quite a few
As soon as it happened, a very warlike people suddenly decided they were pacifists. MacArthur spent more US $ rebuilding Japan, because contrary to the worst fears of the Japanese, he thought it was the right thing to do. He was dead-on right. That was money well-spent as well. Humanitarian reasons aside, Japan is now a firm ally. They are certainly lined up behind any non-proliferation actions, unless that brutal bastard in N. Korea *forces* them to develop nuclear arms, because the US waffles on something.
They hurt us bad, we hurt them worse, we're all even, and they're our friends. Good friends. I wish it hadn't happened, but not so much as the guys who served at the time. Bet on that, ladies and gentlemen. Don't get all PC, and sobbing over the cruelty of something that happened 60 years ago, and wasn't our fault to begin with. Enjoy what we have--the current friendship of a great people.
At this point, the US and Japan should just go off and build a lunar colony or something together. That's what friends are for, at the nation-state level: to do remarkable things that could not be done alone.
What you do with a computer does not constitute the whole of computing.
It should be remembered that the dropping of the atomic bomb wasn't the first instance of atrocities against civilians. Firebombing and saturation bombing killed far more than the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan.
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From the minutes of the Target Committee Meeting of May 10-11, 1945:
Hiroshima was selected because of the depot, because of the industrial area (which included military manufacturing), and to see how the hills would reflect the explosion.
Truman specifically avoided targeting purely civilian locations, including an order that Tokyo and Kyoto not be on the list. He accepted that civilian losses would be there; his speech stated as much when he said, "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians."
Nagasaki was the second target of its day, and was a significant military port.
There is no debate that Japan was not in fighting shape anymore. The Potsdam Declaration (which demanded the disarming of Japan, the dismantling of war industries, the occupation of the islands, renouncement of territorial claims outside of the home islands, institution of a new government, handing over war criminals, and the occupation of Japan until such time as the above conditions were met, under pain of "total destruction", and there would be no negotiations) admitted as much. But the first reaction to the Declaration by the Japanese was to not comment (specifically, "mokusatsu" which may have been misinterpreted as intentionally refusing comment).
Had Japan been considering a conditional surrender? If they had, I've not been able to find anything solid on it. The only terms that I've found commonly suggested centered around keeping the emperor, having no foreign occupiers, and trying their own war criminals. These weren't going to go over well with the exception of keeping the emperor, because there was a severe lack of trust of the Japanese to follow through on their own and not rearm. The emperor had seen enough by this point, and was re-asserting himself to demand the end of the war, but this wasn't coming around fast enough because he still didn't have enough power. After the first bombing, no surrender announcement was made, and even after Nagasaki was hit, it still took four days of internal bickering before the emperor could come out and announce the surrender.
As for the losses, an invasion force of some 650,000 was being prepared. Okinawa had involved some 300,000 Allied troops and took nearly 50,000 casualties, one of four of which were deaths. More than 110,000 Japanese were dead, making for about a 9:1 kill ratio. Had similar rations occurred in a mainland invasion, it would have involve more than 100,000 casualties with 27,000 dead on the US side alone, and a quarter-million dead Japanese. However, the closer to the home islands the fighting got, the more extreme the Japanese became in their defensive efforts, and it's likely that the fighting would have been even more fierce, with losses even higher, because cities would be bombed prior to troop arrival, and it wasn't hard to kill tens of thousands with one raid.
You can never go home again... but I guess you can shop there.
Hiroshima had industrial targets, this much is true. It was not however, a "military base". Pretty much any city in a wartime nation has some targets of military value, that does not make the city itself a military base. Would you call Chicago a military base in and of itself? Would you call an attack or a bombing of Chicago to be an attack against a military base?
"Truman specifically avoided targeting purely civilian locations, including an order that Tokyo and Kyoto not be on the list."
Tokyo was pretty much decimated because of the fire-bombings. If it had not been for that it too would not have been "purely civilian". I don't know how much more of a pure civilian target you can get than dropping a nuclear warhead in the center of a large populated city consisting mostly of civilians.
Let's take a look at more of the radio adress by Truman.
"The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians. But that attack is only a warning of things to come. If Japan does not surrender, bombs will have to be dropped on her war industries and, unfortunately, thousands of civilian lives will be lost."
This seems almost to suggest that the attack on Hiroshima was almost purely against a military target, and "thousands" of lives hadn't already been lost. Certainly seems to downplay the attack in my view.
"Nagasaki was the second target of its day, and was a significant military port."
Why not just attack the military targets in these two cities? Nuclear bombing was for the purpose of destroying the military targets? It most certainly was not military targets that the bombs were needed for. It was an attack on civilian populations, (and if the officially stated reasons are the only ones), an attack to frighten and terrorize the Japanese into submission through it's sheer devestation to entire cities, not as an attack on valid military targets to stop the military.
"Having found the bomb we have used it. We have used it against those who attacked us without warning at Pearl Harbor, against those who have starved and beaten and executed American prisoners of war, against those who have abandoned all pretense of obeying international laws of warfare."
So those who do not follow the rules of war, need to have nuclear weapons dropped on their civilians? That is part of the justification? Surely "intentional" killing of hundreds of thousands of civilians, for any reason, is against what anyone would consider the rules of war. But it is justified because the other side did bad things? If we care so much about the rules of war, and treating soldiers, as well as civilians decently, we would not have to stoop to such tactics.
"Had Japan been considering a conditional surrender?"
Secretary Togo was talking to the USSR, the only major nation they were still at peace with, in order to act as an intermediary with the USA. The US, having cracked the Japanese codes, was aware of this and learned of it prior to Potsdam. Efforts were being made by the new civilian government of Japan, (Tojo and the power structure had resigned in shame), to end the war and negotiate a settlement with the USA, and to ensure the survival of the Emperor, which was the paramount concern. Negotiations were certainly being considered throughout the entire war. The plan of Japan's attack on the USA was to destroy the Pacific fleet in order to entirely eliminate the US presence in the region, thereby allowing the Japanese to take the Dutch East Indies, and the oil and rubber resources in the region, which they were in need of for their aggression in the rest of the Pacific Theater. After eliminating the US pacific fleet, they would then sue for peace with the US in order to avoid having to go to war with them on a massive scale, which they knew they could not win. This is very well established as being their strategy, and not just among cracy hippie professors.
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