Documented Facts About The Hiroshima-Nagasaki Bombings:

-From a review of the book "Operation Downfall"

Here's the book, your library should have it if you're interested (caveat- I haven't read it and am not well read on this subjest):

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0141001461/qid=1081534749/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1_xs_stripbooks_i1_xgl14/102-3361340-2616137?v=glance&s=books

There were other parts of the Japanese government that were trying to get a truce with the Russians, but considering all that had gone down, you know that was never going to be considered by the U.S.

The Japanese military was also definitely preparing for invasion. Considering the carnage that happened in Okinawa, I find it hard to fathom what a full scale invasion of the rest of Japan would have been like.

"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 almost defeated and ready to surrender...in being the first to use it, we...adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages."
---Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy,
Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during World War II

And he's not the only major figure who disagreed that vaporizing 100,000 civilians
was necessary.

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

"That unconditional surrender remained an obstacle to peace in the wake of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Soviet declaration of war - until the government of the United States offered the necessary (albeit veiled) assurance that neither Emperor nor throne would be destroyed - suggests the possibility, which even Stimson later recognized, that neither bomb may have been necessary; and certainly that the second one was not."
(Stimson & Bundy, pg. 627).

"Had the Allies given the prince a week of grace in which to obtain his government's support for acceptance, the war might have ended toward the latter part of July or the very beginning of August, without the atomic bomb and without Soviet participation in the conflict. "

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27a/047.html

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/7478557.htm?1c
This news story contains a quote by Eisenhower against the bombing.

http://www.oneworld.org/news/world/bloomfield.html
http://www.progressive.org/mpdvhz00.htm

Reviewing this topic, the evidence against bombing seems very strong.

"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 almost defeated and ready to surrender...in being the first to use it, we...adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages."
---Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy,
Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during World War II

And he's not the only major figure who disagreed that vaporizing 100,000 civilians
was necessary.

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

"That unconditional surrender remained an obstacle to peace in the wake of Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Soviet declaration of war - until the government of the United States offered the necessary (albeit veiled) assurance that neither Emperor nor throne would be destroyed - suggests the possibility, which even Stimson later recognized, that neither bomb may have been necessary; and certainly that the second one was not."
(Stimson & Bundy, pg. 627).

"Had the Allies given the prince a week of grace in which to obtain his government's support for acceptance, the war might have ended toward the latter part of July or the very beginning of August, without the atomic bomb and without Soviet participation in the conflict. "

http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v16/v16n3p-4_Weber.html
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/27a/047.html

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/news/opinion/7478557.htm?1c
This news story contains a quote by Eisenhower against the bombing.

http://www.oneworld.org/news/world/bloomfield.html
http://www.progressive.org/mpdvhz00.htm

Reviewing this topic, the evidence against bombing seems very strong.

P. S Ryan, the belief that Japan or Germany could have somehow defeated
the United States is without merit.

well yeah that's kind of obvious. not really my point though. i was just musing on the fact that, while i agree that the bombings were morally wrong in an objective sense (by this i mean i would have been relieved if i was a marine at the time), casting japan as some kind of innocent victim is a bit silly and only serves to profit facile anti-americanism like your accusations that the US was "testosterone fueled." nothing you've posted shows any mature understanding of the situation. all you've really shown is a maniacal desire to cast the US as the devil. it's not moral relativsm, it's just absolutism from the other side.

You call me "maniacal." I think "maniacal" is a very fitting
term for the unacceptable behavior of Truman & Co.

I have studied the issue with an open mind, and I believe
my opinion is supported by the facts. Your casting me
as rigid or absolutist does not bother me; the facts are rigid
and absolute.

But is it not possible to respect their memory and still accept
the truth about what happened, what injustices may have occurred?

http://www.osric.com/~jeremy/fat_bee_polaroid.gif

If I sound naive or pompous, so be it, but I refuse to resign
myself and cynically accept atrocities.

Funny argument to make - "why concentrate on this atrocity when there are so many others to look at! Spread the indignation!"

Yes, the outcome was gruesome, but so many more, thousands of times over, had already died.

I guess you had to be there.

I read that as purely a joke initiallly, but it's a good point. Good to remind yourself of when you're studying history. (btw, I think calling opinions collected by some guy off the internet "documented facts" is stretching it just li'l)

Girolamo, you'd be surprised.

er, i don't seem to recall what the many children incinerated in both attacks did to contribute to the japanese imperial war machine...

same response from me

1) Given that the half-assed surrender of Germany after WWI more or less paved the way for WWII, the US's instistence on unconditional surrender was not just a matter of bloodthirst and glory-seeking. They were genuinely concerned that anything less than unconditional surrender would lead to another false peace, and ultimately another war.

2) The administration recognized quite early that end of this particular hot war would also be the beginning of the Cold War, and wanted to send a message to the Soviets: we have the bomb, and we're willing to use it.

Again, neither of these excuses the acts, but they do a little more to explain them than the notion that the Truman administration got some bizarre thrill from watching innocent people die.

(I suppose the Germans don't, in their anti-fascist/anti-Nazi bent.)

There are many Americans who do not believe that it is an atrocity when _we_
do it, or at best that it was an unavoidable, necessary atrocity.

Jim Wentworth says:

>I do believe that the concensus at the time was that the bomb would end the
>war sooner. How can you hold Truman accoutable for this?

But the URL's I posted prove that this is incorrect. Dwight Eisenhower himself
argued against dropping the nukes!

Matthew Cohen, we are getting into murkier waters here, but in the opinion
of respected historian Barbara Tuchman, the U.S steered itself into WWI
mainly for the purpose of attaining power and prestige.
Also, if Britain and France had not followed a policy of appeasement,
the German military resurgence would have been impossible. The Allies
withdrew their garrisons from western Germany (the industrial zone)
in the early 30's, against the desperate argument of Winston Churchill,
among others.

But thank you for saying this:

>2) The administration recognized quite early that end of this particular hot war
>would also be the beginning of the Cold War, and wanted to send a message
>to the Soviets: we have the bomb, and we're willing to use it.

This is probably the main reason for dropping the bomb. If this doesn't fit
the definition of "chest-beating" or "dick-waving" I don't know what does.
I don't know that Truman felt a thrill from snuffing out lives, but it's not that bizarre,
if you look at the behavior of generals and leaders.

Milo, I have read that the Germans have in their own way tried to whitewash
their past, to the effect that every town claims "we never truly supported Hitler,
we were the only ones who held out." Still, I don't really hold a grudge against
the Germans or the Japanese. They suffered so much.

http://www.ccmep.org/2004_articles/general/080404_counterpunch.htm

"I thought 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," said General Dwight D. Eisenhower...

General Leslie Groves was less cryptic: "There was never, from about two weeks from the time I took charge of this Project, any illusion on my part but that Russia was our enemy, and the Project was conducted on that basis."

...In March of the following year, Oppenheimer told Truman:

"Mr. President, I have blood on my hands."

Truman's reply: "It'll come out in the wash."

Later, the president told an aide, "Don't bring that fellow around again."

This debate is one I have never been able to successfully resolve for myself, btw.

These games you play, they're gonna end in more than tears someday
Aha Enola Gay, it shouldn't ever have to end this way

It's 8:15, and that's the time that it's always been
We got your message on the radio, conditions normal and you're coming home

Enola Gay, is mother proud of little boy today
Aha this kiss you give, it's never ever gonna fade away

Enola Gay, it shouldn't ever have to end this way
Aha Enola Gay, it shouldn't fade in our dreams away

It's 8:15, and that's the time that it's always been
We got your message on the radio, conditions normal and you're coming home

Enola Gay, is mother proud of little boy today
Aha this kiss you give, it's never ever gonna fade away

BTW I meant differences in them, not than mine are better or anything.

Unlike many people on this thread, apparently, I think the bombings made Hirohito use his imperial authority to convince the cabinet to unconditionally surrender. Every account of those cabinet meetings has the Emperor working very consensually with a die-hard cabinet up until the point where he decided to put his authority and prestige on the line after Nagasaki. Was unconditional surrender a dumb goal to begin with? Many people have pointed out that FDR's decision to acheive this led to untold deaths and much misery, but it can be argued (against a negative admittedly) that total surrender led to the relatively reformed post-war German and Japanese governements and society and that negotiated surrenders might not have. What price might we have paid for that down the line?

I can assure you that if Truman had not used the bombs, there would eventually been an outcry amongst that part of the U.S. electorate that would end up voting for McCarthy and that this too must have influenced his decision. The justification generally used for Nagasaki and Hiroshima is, as one Army estimate had it, that there would have been as many as 500,000 U.S. casualties in invading and pacifying Japan, not to mention an awful toll on Japanese civilians and military as the country was worn down and the state and infrasctucure started to fail. Who knows if that was more or less roughly accurate, but to the parents, friends, and loved ones of those GIs, I'm pretty sure that they would have preferred the other bastards to die for their country.

My view is that it's simply not acceptable to excuse the mass-murder of 350,000 civilians (or whatever the correct number is). I would be happy if the American (Western?) perspective on the a-bomb attacks changed to recognize that the attack was not justified as it fit into a strategy of mass slaughter employed by both sides in WWII. However, I doubt we'll see that happen as long as veterans are still alive.

And regarding atrocities in textbooks, you don't see a lot of mention of the hundreds of thousands killed in the firebombing of Tokyo and Dresden in the average middle school textbook in the U.S.

ps. we didn't know when to quit with the japanese, apparently.

February 13, 1950 – B-36 2075, en route from Alaska to perform a simulated bombing run on Californian cities, developed multiple engine fires due to carburetor icing in the extreme cold. The crew dumped the single Mark IV bomb (carrying the depleted uranium tamper but not its plutonium core) off British Columbia, then abandoned ship. The high explosives detonated on impact.[11]

April 11, 1950 – A B-29 bomber crashed three minutes after takeoff from Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico. A nuclear bomb with no detonators installed was on board at the time of the crash; its casing was destroyed, but the weapon did not go off.[12]

August 5, 1950 – A nuclear-armed B-29 Superfortress had problems during take off from Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base in California. The emergency landing ended in a fiery crash. A fire fighting team was dispatched in an attempt to rescue the crew. In the midst of the rescue effort the intense fire detonated over 10,000-pounds of high explosive used in the primary portion of the nuclear weapon killing 19 people. The explosion formed a twenty-yard crater across in the runway. One of the people killed in the rescue attempt was Gen. Robert F. Travis for whom the base is now named.

November 10, 1950 – A B-50 returning one of several US Mark IV bombs secretly deployed in Canada had engine trouble and jettisoned the weapon at 10,500 feet (3,200 m). The bomb, carrying the depleted uranium tamper but not its plutonium core ("pit"), was set to self-destruct at 2500' (750 m) and dropped over the St. Lawrence River off Rivière du Loup, Quebec. The explosion shook area residents and scattered nearly 100 pounds (45 kg) of depleted uranium.[13]
* April 26, 1953 – A class of radiochemistry students at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, observed high levels of radiation. Ground radiation averaged about 50 Ci/km² (2 kBq/km²); some puddles registered 270 nCi/L (10 Bq/m³), nearly 3000 times the United States Atomic Energy Commission limit. The radiation was traced to fallout from the Simon test, which had occurred two days previously.[14] An even worse rainout followed in June. [15]

* May 19, 1953 – The United States government detonated the 32-kiloton of TNT (130 TJ) bomb "Harry" at the Nevada test site. The bomb later gained the name "Dirty Harry" because of the tremendous amount of offsite fallout generated by the bomb. [16] Winds carried fallout 135 miles (220 km) to St. George, Utah, where residents reported "an oddly metallic sort of taste in the air." [17] A 1962 AEC report found that "children living in St. George, Utah, may have received doses to the thyroid of radioiodine as high as 120 to 440 rads" (1.2 to 4.4 Gy). [18]

March 1, 1954 – During the early morning of March 1st, a Japanese Fishing boat, the Daigo Fukuryu Maru, or "Number 5 Lucky Dragon," and its crew witnessed what they believed to be the sun rising to the west of them as they sailed in the Pacific Ocean. In fact, they were witnessing the 15 megaton of TNT (63 PJ) detonation of the hydrogen bomb "Castle Bravo" at the Bikini Atoll, 85 miles (140 km) away. Four hours later, white ash began to fall like snow onto the boat. Many of the crew members gathered the ash into bags as souvenirs. Before the evening was over, the entire crew had become ill. The 23 crew members were hospitalized in Japan, and one later died of kidney failure due to radiation exposure. The incident brought a rift in relations between Japan and the United States because the US did not warn Japan or any other country of the bomb's testing, leaving the Lucky Dragon exposed to the fallout. (In partial mitigation, the device yielded about 2½ times what was predicted because of an overlooked reaction; the US expanded its exclusion zones in later tests.) Fallout was enhanced by debris from coral dispersed by the explosion. The US issued an apology and paid 2 million US dollars in compensation. [19] Additionally, in the same incident, 64 natives of Rongelap Atoll were exposed for 50 hours to fallout that produced a whole-body radiation dose of 1.75 Sv, 28 residents of Rongerik atoll were exposed to doses of about 780 mSv before being permanently evacuated, 18 residents of Alininae atoll were exposed to 680 mSv for about 50 hours, and 157 residents of Utirik atoll were exposed to 140 mSv for about 55 to 75 hours.

First notice of radioactivity in the fallout was raised seven hours after the detonation, when fallout reached Rongerik atoll. A group of 28 service members working at the weather station on Rongerik, 160 miles (260 km) east of Bikini, began evacuating about 30 hours after the explosion.

1955 – Unexpected wind shift dropped test fallout on Las Vegas, Nevada [20]

July 26, 1956 – A US B-47 practising landings at RAF Lakenheath (Air Base) in Suffolk, England, skidded into a nuclear storage mound with three Mark VI bombs inside. The resulting fire was extinguished without sparking explosions, although a secret cable by U.S. 7th Air Division General James Walsh in Britain remarked that the bombs were "knocked about," and "Preliminary exam by bomb disposal officer says a miracle that one Mark Six with exposed detonators sheared didn't go." He was presumably referring to the possibility of a high explosive detonation and possible radiological contamination of the area, rather than a nuclear explosion. Accidental ignition of the explosives in a nuclear weapon is insufficient to trigger the nuclear explosion of an implosion assembly weapon, such as those involved in the accident, because this requires the precisely synchronised simultaneous detonation of its numerous explosive lenses (although it could detonate a gun-assembly weapon).

May 22, 1957 – Land grants of University of New Mexico, near Albuquerque, New Mexico: A bomber accidentally dropped a 10-megaton of TNT (40 PJ) hydrogen bomb. The trigger explosive detonated, creating a 12 foot (4 m) deep crater 25 feet (8 m) across. Some radiation was detected.

July 28, 1957 – A C-124 Globemaster with 3 nuclear weapons and a nuclear capsule from Dover Air Force Base lost power in two engines. Two weapons were jettisoned somewhere off Rehobeth, Delaware, and Cape May, New Jersey/Wildwood, New Jersey; they were reportedly never found.

September 11, 1957 – A major fire at Rocky Flats weapon mill 27 km from Denver began in a glove box and spread through the ventilation system into the stack filters. Plutonium (among lesser evils) was released, but no one was sure how much; estimates ranged from 25 mg to 250 kg. [24] [25] [26] [27]

* January 31, 1958 – A B-47 with a fully armed nuclear weapon crashes and burns for 7 hours at a US Air Force base, 90 miles (145 km) N.E. of Rabat, Morocco. The Air Force evacuates everyone within 1 mile (1.6 km) of the base. Many vehicles and aircraft are contaminated. However, Moroccan officials are not notified.

* February 5, 1958 – A damaged B-47 off the coast of the US state of Georgia, flying near Tybee Island, jettisons a weapon lacking its nuclear core from 7200 feet (2,200 m) after attempting to land three times at Hunter Air Force Base. The plane had suffered a collision with an F-86 during simulated combat near Savannah, Georgia, and could not land safely with the heavy bomb on board. The bomb is never recovered. See Tybee Bomb for further information.

* February 28, 1958 – At the US-leased RAF airbase at Greenham Common, England, a B-47E of the 310th Bomb Wing developed problems shortly after takeoff and jettisoned its two 1,700 gallon external fuel tanks. They missed their designated safe impact area and one hit a hangar whilst the other struck the ground 65 feet (20 m) behind a parked B-47E. The parked B-47E, which was fuelled with a pilot onboard and carrying a 1.1 megaton of TNT (4.6 PJ) B28 thermonuclear free fall bomb, was engulfed by flames. The conflagration took sixteen hours and over a million gallons of water to extinguish, partly because of the magnesium alloys used in the aircraft. The fire detonated the high explosives in the nuclear weapon and convection spread plutonium and uranium oxides over a wide area — foliage up to 13 kilometres away was contaminated with uranium-235. Although two men were killed and eight injured, the US and UK governments kept the accident secret — as late as 1985, the British Government claimed that a taxiing aircraft had struck a parked one and that no fire was involved. However two scientists, F.H. Cripps and A. Stimson, working for the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment at Aldermaston, independently discovered high concentrations of radioactive contamination around the base in 1960. Their secret report referring to the accident was declassified in 1996.

1958 – Unexpected wind shift drops test fallout on Los Angeles, California [33]

March 11, 1958 – A B-47 from Hunter Air Force Base in Georgia, en route to an overseas base, drops an unarmed nuclear weapon into the yard of Walter Gregg and his family in Mars Bluff, near Florence, South Carolina. The trigger explodes and destroys Gregg's house, injuring six members of his family. The blast forms a crater 60 feet (20 m) wide and 30 feet (10 m) deep. Five houses and a church are also damaged. Residents carry away radioactive pieces of the bomb for souvenirs, which have to be retrieved by an Air Force cleanup crew. Five months later the Air Force pays the Greggs $54,000 of his estimated $300,000 loss.

November 4, 1958 – A B-47 bearing nuclear bombs burns in flight, crashing in Texas.

* October, 1959 – One killed and 3 seriously burned in explosion and fire of prototype reactor for the USS Triton (SSRN/SSN-586) at the United States Navy's training center in West Milton, New York. The Navy stated, "The explosion was completely unrelated to the reactor or any of its principal auxiliary systems," but sources familiar with the operation claim that the high-pressure air flask that exploded was to feed a crucial reactor-problem backup system.

* October 15, 1959 – A B-52 with two nuclear bombs collides with a KC-135 tanker and crashes in Kentucky

i dropped the bombs cos i don't like japanese people. i mean, they eat RAW FISH people.

There was a pretty massive article on this a couple of months ago in either GQ or Esquire.

is it possible that your alleged consensus on the use of these weapons existed in '45 when it doesn't exist now?

Of course it's possible. Are you making the point that the consensus then--military and otherwise--was that atomic weaponry was not the right option? Or are you suggesting the "facts" presented on this thread were/are the consensus?

The point of my post (obviously) was not advocacy for atomic bombs or nukes or atrocities or wars. It was that during the short-view of war, it's much more about winning and losing than daily death counts or the predictable atrocities and mayhem. And citizens by and large accept this in the short-term depending on the context of, say, their country being directly attacked and having war declared upon them. Yes, propaganda plays a key role in support (or not) for war activities (BUSH LIED, PEOPLE DIED, IRAQ IS A WAR CRIME, HATE IS NOT A FAMILY VALUE) but if you want to make the case that there was no citizen consensus for vaporizing the Japanese (or firebombing Dresden et al or the massive bloodletting at Normandy) then by all means do it. I'm not really sure there's ever "consensus" on anything that the government does; was the prevailing opinion among Americans in August of 1945 that atomic weaponry was a mistake? Again, my point is that in the short-term, atrocities and death are a lot easier to accept--as time goes on it's a lot easier to use the luxury of hindsight to assess military action.

so I suppose the central question would be, "is it fair to judge the actions of our leaders in 1945 by the moral standards of today?" I say, 'yes.' Thus, killing 300,000 people with WMDs is wrong no matter the context.

Although hundreds of thousands of Japanese lives were lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the bombings are often explained away as a "life-saving" measure-American lives. Exactly how many lives saved is, however, up for grabs. (We do know of a few U.S. soldiers who fell between the cracks About a dozen or more American POWs were killed in Hiroshima, a truth that remained hidden for some 30 years.) In defense of the U.S. action, it is usually claimed that the bombs saved lives. The hypothetical body count ranges from 20,000 to "millions." In an August 9, 1945 statement to "the men and women of the Manhattan Project," President Truman declared the hope that "this new weapon will result in saving thousands of American lives."

"The president's initial formulation of 'thousands," however, was clearly not his final statement on the matter to say the least," remarks historian Gar Alperovitz. In his book, "The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth," Alperovitz documents but a few of Truman's public estimates throughout the years:

*December 15, 1945: "It occurred to me that a quarter of a million of the flower of our young manhood was worth a couple of Japanese cities . . ."

*Late 1946: "A year less of war will mean life for three hundred thousand-maybe half a million-of America's finest youth."

*October 1948: "In the long run we could save a quarter of a million young Americans from being killed, and would save an equal number of Japanese young men from being killed."

*April 6, 1949: "I thought 200,000 of our young men would be saved."

*November 1949: Truman quotes Army Chief of Staff George S. Marshall as estimating the cost of an Allied invasion of Japan to be "half a million casualties."

*January 12, 1953: Still quoting Marshall, Truman raises the estimate to "a minimum one quarter of a million" and maybe "as much as a million, on the American side alone, with an equal number of the enemy."

*Finally, on April 28, 1959, Truman concluded: "the dropping of the bombs . . . saved millions of lives."

Fortunately, we are not operating without the benefit of official estimates.

In June 1945, Truman ordered the U.S. military to calculate the cost in American lives for a planned assault on Japan. Consequently, the Joint War Plans Committee prepared a report for the Chiefs of Staff, dated June 15, 1945, thus providing the closest thing anyone has to "accurate": 40,000 U.S. soldiers killed, 150,000 wounded, and 3,500 missing.

While the actual casualty count remains unknowable, it was widely known at the time that Japan had been trying to surrender for months prior to the atomic bombing. A May 5, 1945 cable, intercepted and decoded by the U.S., "dispelled any possible doubt that the Japanese were eager to sue for peace." In fact, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reported shortly after the war, that Japan "in all probability" would have surrendered before the much-discussed November 1, 1945 Allied invasion of the homeland.

Truman himself eloquently noted in his diary that Stalin would "be in the Jap War on August 15th. Fini (sic) Japs when that comes about."

OK, but there is a difference between suing for peace and surrendering. The Allies had adopted the policy of only accepting Unconditional Surrender with respect to Germany & Japan, and the Japanese weren't ready to go that far until the bomb dropped.

Now, you can then get into a discussion about whether the unconditional surrender thing was a good or a bad idea (from both a moral and practical point of view). The logic for it at the time was that the Axis powers had to decisively admit they had been beaten so as to stop rightwingers in those countries claiming they had not in fact been defeated.

In fact, the U.S. Strategic Bombing Survey reported shortly after the war, that Japan "in all probability" would have surrendered before the much-discussed November 1, 1945 Allied invasion of the homeland.

was that based on information they gained after the end of the war?

And that was, presumably, because of the way the First World War ended; afterwards, right-wing German politicians liked to claim that the Imperial Army had not been defeated on the battlefield.

i'm not even taking a side vis-a-vis right or wrong. i'm just saying that you're mistaken that there was some sort of consensus, even in the military, that using the atomic bomb was the right thing to do. and i think the lack of consensus now has everything to do with the lack of consensus then, and that you're simplifying americans' desire for "avenging pearl harbor" with how that should come about.

I think the main purpose of dropping the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki was to kill a lot of Japanese people because we were like, still at WAR with them and we were trying to WIN.

Also, this thread isn't nearly as good as the Nanking thread. Oh wait, there is none.

http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=5894&R=C62A29C91

haha i mean "minus -- it killed lots of innocent japanese and wasn't necc. to end the war. plus -- it started the cold war. yay!" wtf? who liked the cold war!? not even "war games" did!

Not at all.

(what's nanking?!?!?)

KIDDING, MR. JESUS.

-- Matthew Cohen (owl_of_minerv...), April 10th, 2004. (flightsatdusk)

Nobody seems to be discussing that if the use of atomic weapons on Japan was in part a warning to the Soviet Union, that it
might or might not have been a legitimate action. I'm not sure how many Soviet troops there were in Central and Eastern (i.e.
non USSR) Europe but they certainly outnumbered all the other allies, and to have this happen right after the SU had finally
begun to fight against Japan (establishing on the same day a communist government in Korea) and essentially right after
Potsdam may have been a canny way to keep Stalin from trying to move farther into Western Europe.

This debate is one I have never been able to successfully resolve for myself, btw.

-- M. White (deir...), August 9th, 2005. (Miguelito) (later)

fantastic 'documented fact' to pull out for point number two.

Newly released photos of Hiroshima from the United States Strategic Bombing Survey: http://lightbox.time.com/2011/05/19/hiroshima-ground-zero-1945/#10

There is little point in attempting precisely to impute Japan's unconditional surrender to any one of the numerous causes which jointly and cumulatively were responsible for Japan's disaster. The time lapse between military impotence and political acceptance of the inevitable might have been shorter had the political structure of Japan permitted a more rapid and decisive determination of national policies. Nevertheless, it seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion.

- UNITED STATES STRATEGIC BOMBING SURVEY SUMMARY REPORT (Pacific War) WASHINGTON, D.C. 1 JULY 1946

One of the interesting things about the Bombing Surveys from both theaters is how they concluded that carpet bombing cities and even precision bombing factories was largely ineffective. The kind of strategic bombing which worked was the destruction of transport links (bridges, ships & barges, docks) which brought the movement of war materiel to a halt.

Those pictures are extremely painful to see and I can't articulate how sad and angry they make me.

considered clicking that link, but refrained

dangit

‏@DennisThePerrin
I talked about Hiroshima on BBC World Service this morning. My spot begins around the 28:10 mark

http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p02ybvd0

Would the bomb have been dropped if FDR had lived a few more years? He was a far sharper operator than the dim + hawkish Truman and might have been able to get Stalin to cool down his plans for eastern expansionism. He was the only person capable of getting concessions out of Stalin and by the same token might have negotiated surrender.

Recomend the Librivox (public domain audiobooks) recording of The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima & Nagasaki, the initial 1946 report by the Manhattan Engineer District. In particular, the harrowing tale of Jesuit Father John A. Siemes, which is parts 7 & 8 of the recording.

The particular horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are undeniable. As a college student I read three different accounts of the bombings written within a couple of years of the bombings, so they were fresh memories, and they made a powerful impression on me. I've seen the photos of ground zero. But it is necessary to recall that they were embedded in the context of the most horrific war in human history and similar levels of horror were achieved in countless locations during that war.

What makes Hiroshima and Nagasaki unique wasn't the extent of death, damage and chaos they wrought, but the instantaneous nature of their occurrence and our knowledge that nuclear weapons are now x100 more powerful than in 1945 and we could be their next targets. If we're honest, that is much of what haunts us so deeply about Hiroshima as opposed to, for example, the fire bombing of Tokyo or the carpet bombing of Vietnam.