Twilight of the Bomb

merbs writes: On the 70th anniversary of the first nuclear bomb, Motherboard's Brian Merchant toured its crater with one of the last living Manhattan Project scientists. Here's the inside story of the road to the bomb, with the 90-year-old Murray Peshkin—the youngest man to work on the Project that built the bomb, and the first to set foot in its crater. From the story: "There are still nine nuclear nations that, between them, have stockpiled 16,300 weapons. And this network of decades-old nuclear armaments, some of which are still aimed at various strategic choke points around the globe, leaves civilizational scale death-becoming a technical possibility. Before all that, though, the atom bomb was one of the most successful science experiments of all time. It was the product of billions of dollars in government spending, hundreds of the world’s top scientists working in concert, in secret, in a city built from scratch in the desert, and a bygone patriotism united by common, Manichean cause: stop Hitler, defeat the Japanese."

Comments

It is what it is

[TWX]

The United States is very good at estimating military casualties. It's necessary when war is waged on a huge scale, and good numbers are needed if the war effort is to be as efficient as possible.

The United States had a million Purple Hearts manufactured to award to the soldiers expected to be killed or wounded in action in the invasion of Japan. They're still using that stock today, after Korea, after Vietnam after Grenada, after Panama, after Afghanistan, after Iraq.

Even at the highest estimated death toll, less than a quarter of the number of people died due to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as would have been killed or wounded on just the American side of a full invasion of Japan.

Murray Peshkin does not have to take pride in his work, but he should not feel that he is party to a war crime either.

Re:It is what it is

[serviscope_minor]

As always the situation is never as simple as people like and hindsight is 20/20. The US was waging an incredibly bloody war against the Japanese and wanted it over. Fast, and while Japan was close to surrender, the military was still holding out, and that, after all is the important bit.They also had a new superweapon they wanted to test (though the practical effects were really no worse than the massed bomber raids). It was also clear that while the bomber raids were incredibly damaging, they didn't seem to induce surrender.

But, it's not just that.

They needed Japan to surrender RIGHT NOW, because their other allies, the Communists, were busy overrunning everything in their path, and the US government really did not want Japan to become a Communist sattelite state, so they needed immediate, unconditional surrender, so that it was done and dusted by the time the communist armies could arrive.

It was never as simple as just wanting tosee how good it was on civillian populations.

Re:It is what it is

[Rei]

We're not talking about playing Monday Morning Quarterback. There's a ton of revisionist history that happened after the war trying to pretend that everyone was in agreement about using nuclear weapons on cities and that it would have prevented millions of deaths from a ground war in the home islands with Japan. But that's just not the reality. The US's military leaders themselves were split over the use of the bomb. Some were adamantly opposed to using it on cities - among them, they were split further into groups who wanted to use it only on enemy troops, and groups that wanted to only use it as a pre-arranged "this is what you've coming if you don't surrender" demonstration to back up the Potsdam declaration. Likewise, official military casualty estimates were all over the board - yes, they ranged upwards of a million or more, but also down to the tens of thousands. There were many who were convinced that Japan was just getting ready to surrender. Even among those who wanted to bomb Japanese cities there was sometimes expressed a fear that Japan was about to surrender, insomuch as they wanted to be able to get a final show of force in to put the US in a better negotiation position vs. the Soviets after the war.

After the war, the US launched the Strategic Bombing Survey to determine how effective the various tactics used in both theatres were at achieving their objectives - everything from attacks against oil infrastructure to the atomic bombs. It made use of vast numbers of interviews and the huge troves of documents captured after the war to be able to get a comprehensive view. The report indicated that the atomic bombs had no impact on the voting of Japan's war council - the division of votes between the hawks and doves remained exactly the same before and after the attacks. All that did change was that it pushed up the urgency in the emperor's schedule. Japan's war council had already agreed to surrender on June 26th, albeit with terms (although half of the council was already willing to accept unconditional surrender). The emperor prepared a mission involving his son to go out with instructions from the council to negotiate a conditional surrender, but was secretly instructed to accept unconditional surrender if it was the only option available. The mission was pushed back due to the Potsdam conference, which ultimately issued the Potsdam declaration on July 26. The emperor twice broke his customary silence with the War Council during this period, once before and once after the bombings, speaking in favor of accepting the Potsdam terms; it was becoming increasingly hard for the War Council to say no. It's important to remember what Japan had already lived through - the main reason for example that an atomic bomb wasn't used on Tokyo was because Tokyo was already a steaming mass of rubble (the bombing report actually refers to the possibility of a bomb being dropped "on the remains of Tokyo"). The bombing survey concluded, "It is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated."

It's understandable that Americans would want to whitewash this history away, to feel that they had "no choice" but to willingly kill hundreds of thousands of innocent men, women and children by design. And the only way to argue that would be to argue that they saved far more people that they killed, and that everyone was in agreement that this brutality would be necessary. But this is unfortunately not reality. US leadership was highly, and often bitterly divided on the issue, and the US's own postwar study concluded that it was not necessary.

A curious sidenote raises a big question mark in the history books on how much Truman actually knew what he was signing onto. He repeatedly made statements to the effect of, and wrote in his diary, that while he felt the US should

Re:It is what it is

[david_thornley]

Only one bomb had been tested, and just because one implosion bomb carefully hand-built by top people exploded well (the estimates of the yield before Trinity varied wildly) didn't mean the next would.

Hiroshima contained the headquarters for the Army charged with the defense of the southern Home Island. It was a legitimate military target. (Under international law, it was the Japanese responsibility to remove military targets from civilian areas, not US responsibility to not bomb anywhere there were civilians.)

Stunning Drop-Off in War Deaths Since

[Kunedog]

This whole vid is well worth your time (seriously, make a note to watch the whole thing today if you haven't), but the last section (starting at 14:20) is particularly striking in how few war deaths have occured since the invention (and rapid development/manufacture) of nuclear weapons.

But the false dichotomy is still there

[foreverdisillusioned]

I'm pretty skeptical of those numbers (I'm also skeptical that the Japanese disengagement happened as fast as you imply), but I'll concede all of that for the moment--this is still a false dichotomy. You're still begin from the conclusion "the second bombing was justified, because otherwise X" and working your way backwards. It's simply not intellectually honest.

Think about it for five seconds and see if you can come up with an alternative that doesn't vaporize 40,000 civilians. Here's one: let's say we drop the second bomb on top of Mount Fuji. Just to bluff and say "hey look, we've got so many of these damn things we can waste 'em, just to give you a show." I do believe that would have made our point pretty clear. Nuking another major civilian population 3 days later is simply not necessary by any stretch of the imagination, even if we concede all kinds of stuff up front.

(I hope I don't have to reiterate disclaimers into every post: yes, I understand it was a different time with different rules and a far different enemy than anything we've faced recently. The point isn't to beat ourselves up about it; the point is simply to have the moral and mental clarity to call a spade a spade.)