Oh, wow, some hardliners weren't happy and tried a coup. That failed. Obviously representative for the overall leaderahip and the nation at large. And a perfectly fine reason to bomb civilians...
That's not the reason to drop the bombs, you need much more than that to reach such a conclusion.
18,000 rebels on one side tried pick a fight with 25,000 government soldiers to prevent a surrender even after the second city had been levelled, is a reason for thinking that Japan was still only borderline ready to surrender at that point, and therefore that it was unlikely to have been ready before this point.
That is a conclusion so, that is not supported by spurce material or facts. It is used to justify the use of nukes to force Japan to surrender by giving credibility to the claim that the jukes saved US lives. That is my problem, because it still defends, utterly pointless, strategic bombing.
Can confirm. I heard that those who wanted to use the nuke had pushback because some people wanted to basically burn all of Japan. I mean we had to request to stop bombing certain targets I think
These replies back and forth are like clockwork. I wan't to hear more about other angles, like, how eager were the Japanese to not have to surrender to the Soviet Union.
Your argument but moved to the current war in Ukraine: How many Ukrainian/Russian lives could be saved by dropping a couple of atomic bombs in Ukraine to force Ukraine to surrender?
You gotta say "some of the worst" or you fail on a technicality right out of the gate. Humanity has been fighting to produce the worst war crimes since ever and displays no particular signs to give it up any time soon.
I can agree that using those nukes was many questionable. Who can truly say if lives were saved from a land invasion. So much is classified and what ifs.
They said "by far" the worst, which is pretty much opposite to your point. If we soften it down to "dropping nukes was pretty bad", it becomes a boring and uncontroversial comment with no punch, and we wouldn't have a huge pile-on of a comment chain discussing it.
I think the comment at the thread root is just wrong then (although the downvotes seem excessive). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_massacres_in_China alone seems to have a couple of worse crimes than the atomic bombs; the Chinese are an old civilisation with reasonable record keeping.
Bad? Yes. "By far the worst war crimes ever committed by any nation"? In war which also featured the holocaust, not even close. You must have anticipated this response?
Agreed. Unfortunately no further interaction from the person...seems like they want to just drive discussion or create discord.....who can say but them at this point
I have a life and was not around... but yes, I am glad there's a discussion, though as usual, people defend their ancestors horrible decisions with the same tired, proven false, arguments. No surprise though.
If you think it would be ok to drop a bomb on Moscow today to force Russia to surrender in the current war, or for Russians to do the same on Kyiv (just imagine how many lives will be saved by stopping the ground invasion, right!??), then you're just using the same rationale as the people defending the Americans' horrible crime. Tell us: do you support one of those?! If not, why not???
Well, of course I did. You think the Holocaust was a war crime?? It was not! It was happening regardless of war as far as I understand the Germans motivations. Yes, it may be an even worse crime (though I would argue that because it happened over many years - you need to take that into account - the Americans would probably kill the full Japanese population if they had not surrended, given enough time), but not a "war crime".
They were not killing Jews to force them to surrender or something... they were trying to exterminate them in Europe simply because of their ideology. The Allies were not fighting to protect the Jews either, mind you. No one really knew the extent of the gas chambers at the time, and I suspect a lot of people in the Allies countries didn't actually mind much anyway - given just how racist their own societies were at the time (I hope I don't need to remind you how blacks/asians and even Italians were treated in America in the 1930's).
I mean don't forget the red army is according to scholars...mostly responsible for the mass raping during the occupation of Germany. Or when Germany was split into two, the Russians refused humanitarian aid in the form of food for the German people who starved.
Or the Japanese military that experimented on people...and then got away with it and managed to find jobs that's to operation paperclip.
I don't like that they happened either, but they were continuously getting leaflets dropped on them by the Americans telling them their cities were going be bombed, told to surrender after the first nuke, and nearly had a coup after the second in order to prevent their surrender.
The people who were in charge, criminalised possession of the letters the Americans were dropping, and those who attempted the coup to continue fighting were from the leadership (not top level, but they did have a lot of support in aggregate).
This isn't to justify civilian casualties, it's only and entirely that the people with the power to surrender were given the opportunity to do so and made aware of the reason to do so well before the nukes actually exploded, and decided they preferred to fight.
Fascinating reading of the timeline. And it does sound a tad like justifying the bombing of civilians, nukes or fire bombing doesn't matter here, for something the leadership does.
I'm blaming the Japanese leadership for not surrendering sooner (though given the coup attempt, I'm not sure if they would've been capable of surrendering).
My opening line was "I don't like that they happened either", and the reason for that is civilian deaths are bad — I reject "total war" as a concept, and I see the Allies use of this in WW2 as having all the moral weight of a child in a playground saying "the other guys did it first" (and not just because I moved from the UK to Berlin about 5 years ago and get to see all the museums, archive footage of bombed-out apartments, and that the house building process still today includes "we have to check for unexploded munitions").
The point is that, even in with the benefit of hindsight, it seems to me that this much force was actually needed to make some very arrogant leaders stop their war.
Also, we can and should learn from hindsight, which suggests e.g. that Hitler's remilitarisation of the Rhineland could have resulted in a coup against him if the French had sent in (IIRC) "a dozen soldiers with bayonets". I presume there were also other missed opportunities in the Pacific theatre, though I don't know them.
>> The point is that, even in with the benefit of hindsight, it seems to me that this much force was actually needed to make some very arrogant leaders stop their war.
None of the leaders actually cared a single bit, the Nazis even wanted to burn down Germany for having lost the war. Industrial output was not really impacted, numbers and assessments from both sides show that, while moral of the bombed was actually stiffened. Including Axis POWs in Normandy being debriefed (understandable, if someone bombs my house and family I do not nexessarily like them much). All the strategic bombing of Germany did was satisfy hunger for revenge (especially in the case of Bomber Harris, whom seemed to be extremely butt hurt after the Blitz), despite knowing strategic bombing doesn't do much after the Blitz. That, and showing Stalin that the Western allies did something on the continent.
The only time strategic bombing had some impact in Europe, was the preparation of Overlord, when Eisenhower basically forced US and UK bomber commands to focus at logistical networks, hubs and oil installations above cities. And even then, civilian casualties, including in France and the Low Countries, were way to high for the results. Again, USAAF and RAF assessments show that. And yet the bombing of civilians continued unabetted. There is simply no defending this.
Now we are getting somewhere interesting in the discussion. What the Japanese High Command is not automatically determining if it was morally right or wrong to drop the bombs.
The Japanese almost coup could have been driven by other concerns than yet-another city turned to ashes, by nuclear or conventional fire. (To spell it out: "let's surrender to the Americans before we have to surrender to the Russians" vs "fight to the end and bring down as many enemies with us as we can".)
>"but they were continuously getting leaflets dropped on them by the Americans telling them their cities were going be bombed"
"But there was never any specific warning to the cities that had been chosen as targets for the atomic bomb prior to the weapon’s first use. The omission was deliberate: The United States feared that the Japanese, being forewarned, would shoot down the planes carrying the bombs. And since Japanese cities were already being destroyed by incendiary and high-explosive bombs on a regular basis — nearly 100,000 people were killed the previous March in the firebombing of Tokyo — there was no reason to believe that either the Potsdam Declaration or Truman’s speech would receive special notice" -[0]
By all definitions, including papers written by both, RAF Bomber Command and the USAAF at the time, deliberate bombing of enemy cities and civilians was a) a crime and b) didn't produce a meaningful effect on enemy moral or warfighting capabilities.
Yes, strategic bombing had no meaningful impact, not on Germany nor on Japan. Or Britain.
By the time the nukes dropped, Japan had already lost everything they needed to continue fighting: ships, raw materials, supply lines, trained soldiers. Same for Germany, except the nukes.
I would say the Rape of Nanking by the Japanese was worse than Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
If I was forced to choose I would have definitely chosen to be in Hiroshima or Nagasaki and endure the atomic bomb and the after effects than I o be in Nanking and endure days of sadistic torture (babies tossed in the air and bayoneted, brothers forced to rape sisters, gang rape, sexual mutilation, etc).
"city materials (concrete, iron and aluminum alloys, industrial glass and soil) were vaporized and mixed with sand, Ota River water and the atmosphere to produce the various glasses"
Well I wonder if were seeing these kinds of formations due to the extream conditions that result from nuclear detonation. I wonder if a fusion bomb would create a similar result....because I know most attempts at modern fusion reactors are using lasers to create extreme temperatures and pressure via controlling condensed plasma
You know we tested fusion bombs as early as the 50s? They've been around quite a while. Also, very few reactors use lasers. The laser system at NIF is actually entirely meant to physically emulate what fusion bombs are like without having to build one and set it off. Reactors typically use magnetic fields instead of lasers, because the approach is much more scalable to things like power generation.
Yeah - saying 'linked' is not helpful, maybe something like 'resemble' would be more informative. On the the Elsevier ScienceDirect page for the paper itself, there is a 'highlights' summary:
• The Hiroshima glasses are condensates produced by the Hiroshima nuclear explosion.
• The wide silicon kinetic fractionations in the Hiroshima glasses can only be explained by condensation.
• In Hiroshima glasses, oxygen mass-independent fractionations resulted from chemical reactions during condensation.
• A scenario was established to describe the formation of the Hiroshima fallout.
• The Hiroshima glasses can be considered an analog of the first condensates of the solar system.
(My apologies if I am inadvertently reposting an LLM-generated summary, but it looks reasonable to my nowhere-near-knowledgable eye.)
54 comments
[ 2.7 ms ] story [ 87.9 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident
That's not the reason to drop the bombs, you need much more than that to reach such a conclusion.
18,000 rebels on one side tried pick a fight with 25,000 government soldiers to prevent a surrender even after the second city had been levelled, is a reason for thinking that Japan was still only borderline ready to surrender at that point, and therefore that it was unlikely to have been ready before this point.
I don't know which bit you're making that specific complaint about, but at this point I don't care.
I can agree that using those nukes was many questionable. Who can truly say if lives were saved from a land invasion. So much is classified and what ifs.
But it is far from the worse war crime.....
If you think it would be ok to drop a bomb on Moscow today to force Russia to surrender in the current war, or for Russians to do the same on Kyiv (just imagine how many lives will be saved by stopping the ground invasion, right!??), then you're just using the same rationale as the people defending the Americans' horrible crime. Tell us: do you support one of those?! If not, why not???
Or the Japanese military that experimented on people...and then got away with it and managed to find jobs that's to operation paperclip.
And developing their own nukes at the same time.
This isn't to justify civilian casualties, it's only and entirely that the people with the power to surrender were given the opportunity to do so and made aware of the reason to do so well before the nukes actually exploded, and decided they preferred to fight.
My opening line was "I don't like that they happened either", and the reason for that is civilian deaths are bad — I reject "total war" as a concept, and I see the Allies use of this in WW2 as having all the moral weight of a child in a playground saying "the other guys did it first" (and not just because I moved from the UK to Berlin about 5 years ago and get to see all the museums, archive footage of bombed-out apartments, and that the house building process still today includes "we have to check for unexploded munitions").
The point is that, even in with the benefit of hindsight, it seems to me that this much force was actually needed to make some very arrogant leaders stop their war.
Also, we can and should learn from hindsight, which suggests e.g. that Hitler's remilitarisation of the Rhineland could have resulted in a coup against him if the French had sent in (IIRC) "a dozen soldiers with bayonets". I presume there were also other missed opportunities in the Pacific theatre, though I don't know them.
>> The point is that, even in with the benefit of hindsight, it seems to me that this much force was actually needed to make some very arrogant leaders stop their war.
None of the leaders actually cared a single bit, the Nazis even wanted to burn down Germany for having lost the war. Industrial output was not really impacted, numbers and assessments from both sides show that, while moral of the bombed was actually stiffened. Including Axis POWs in Normandy being debriefed (understandable, if someone bombs my house and family I do not nexessarily like them much). All the strategic bombing of Germany did was satisfy hunger for revenge (especially in the case of Bomber Harris, whom seemed to be extremely butt hurt after the Blitz), despite knowing strategic bombing doesn't do much after the Blitz. That, and showing Stalin that the Western allies did something on the continent.
The only time strategic bombing had some impact in Europe, was the preparation of Overlord, when Eisenhower basically forced US and UK bomber commands to focus at logistical networks, hubs and oil installations above cities. And even then, civilian casualties, including in France and the Low Countries, were way to high for the results. Again, USAAF and RAF assessments show that. And yet the bombing of civilians continued unabetted. There is simply no defending this.
The Japanese almost coup could have been driven by other concerns than yet-another city turned to ashes, by nuclear or conventional fire. (To spell it out: "let's surrender to the Americans before we have to surrender to the Russians" vs "fight to the end and bring down as many enemies with us as we can".)
"But there was never any specific warning to the cities that had been chosen as targets for the atomic bomb prior to the weapon’s first use. The omission was deliberate: The United States feared that the Japanese, being forewarned, would shoot down the planes carrying the bombs. And since Japanese cities were already being destroyed by incendiary and high-explosive bombs on a regular basis — nearly 100,000 people were killed the previous March in the firebombing of Tokyo — there was no reason to believe that either the Potsdam Declaration or Truman’s speech would receive special notice" -[0]
[0] - https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-the...
By the time the nukes dropped, Japan had already lost everything they needed to continue fighting: ships, raw materials, supply lines, trained soldiers. Same for Germany, except the nukes.
If I was forced to choose I would have definitely chosen to be in Hiroshima or Nagasaki and endure the atomic bomb and the after effects than I o be in Nanking and endure days of sadistic torture (babies tossed in the air and bayoneted, brothers forced to rape sisters, gang rape, sexual mutilation, etc).
"city materials (concrete, iron and aluminum alloys, industrial glass and soil) were vaporized and mixed with sand, Ota River water and the atmosphere to produce the various glasses"
Edit, related - how do elements get created:
https://medium.com/lessons-from-history/the-six-billion-year...
• The Hiroshima glasses are condensates produced by the Hiroshima nuclear explosion.
• The wide silicon kinetic fractionations in the Hiroshima glasses can only be explained by condensation.
• In Hiroshima glasses, oxygen mass-independent fractionations resulted from chemical reactions during condensation.
• A scenario was established to describe the formation of the Hiroshima fallout.
• The Hiroshima glasses can be considered an analog of the first condensates of the solar system.
(My apologies if I am inadvertently reposting an LLM-generated summary, but it looks reasonable to my nowhere-near-knowledgable eye.)
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S00128...