Can the dropping of two atomic bombs by the Americans on the Japanese be justified?

[WillJ]

@ Kentonio: I don't see why we can't judge the decision. I think the only ones who truly lived through the war are the soldiers themselves, and I can certainly see how they might have seen the bomb droppings as a blessing, maybe the best thing they saw in their lives; it meant that the war would be over for them. And that's why, along with the fact that more people (even civilians) would have probably died if the war continued (although I'm not 100% sure of that), I support the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima. But if we gave the Japs a chance to surender right then and there, even more lives would have been saved, and the war would be just as much over; in fact over in a somewhat better way.

If Americans really saw the Japanese people, the regular citizens of Japan that wanted the war to be over just as much as we did, and continue on with their regular lives, as our enemies, then my respect for them has gone down to little or nothing. I cannot see how anyone could think that a Japanese civilian (or at least one against the war) being killed as a good thing due to being our enemy. The deaths in the Hiroshima bombing may have been good, but only because they prevented the future loss of lives. IMO, the deaths in the Nagasaki bombing would only be justified if Japan did not surrender after Hiroshima, but we didn't give them time to do so, AFAIK.

I know I don't understand the true horror of war, and neither does anyone else who hasn't seen it firsthand. But there's no point in killing an extra 70 or so thousand people if it could have been avoided.

 

[Kentonio]

The point is mate that if you are involved in a world wide conflict that is killing our own people in the hundreds of thousands and threatening our own life it is wildly unlikely that you are going to spend any time sitting thinking about the citizens of the country that attacked you and how they might not be such bad people after all. This is what I mean by we cannot judge and dont have the right to judge, we do not life in a comparable situation (thank God) and simply cannot percieve events in the way they were percieved back then, bear in mind also that back then people simply didnt have the sources of information they have now, to most westerners the Japanese were some bizarre, mysterious foreign race that may as well have been martians for all the empathy they felt towards them. A final point is that we now have intelligence reports detailing huge anounts of information on what was happening there at the time, the US commanders simply did not have that kind of reference material back then, they were having to percieve the situation based on intelligence intercepts and such scraps of information that were able to be gathered, they didnt even know if what they were hearing from Japan was true or simply misinformation. Imagine being in that situation where you know very little for sure, you are living in a long running climate of fear and where any mistake on your part could cost the lives of thousands of not only your own soldiers but the civilians of your enemy. How can we possibly judge these men harshly for an action that may well have saved millions of lives? Even today with all the knowledge we have we cannot say for sure that they were wrong so how could they know back then?

 

[Grille]

About the judgement, I think Zcylen has already hit the bulls-eye:

Originally posted by Zcylen
no matter who would have used the bomb, the target were civilians, both sides did terrible things.
today is justified since US won the war and the winner are always "the good guys"
its been that way since ancient times.

 

[WillJ]

@ Kentonio: I see what you're saying. But the limit of info that was passed around does not mean that they don't know whether or not and when Japan surrenders, which is all that matters. I doubt that Truman and important politicans of the time thought of the Japs the way you described them (only normal, less educated Americans would think like that). All I'm saying is that, no matter how bad the war was, no matter how much America and its soldiers had been in danger for the past few years, I don't see why we couldn't have given the Japanese a chance to surrender after Hiroshima. It just doesn't make sense to me; there was probably a decent chance that they would indeed surrender. If they don't surrender, go ahead and bomb them again. And I'm not really trying to judge the people who made the decision harshly; I understand that people thought differently back then. I just disagree with them.

 

[Kentonio]

There is also the point that the effects of nuclear weapons had never been seen in actual action. Its one thing to test bombs out in the desert and study the effects and another to actual use them. One of the observers on board the Enola Gay for instance ended up becoming one of the worlds most dedicated peace protestors as a result of what he saw that day yet he had certainly seen the documentation on this weapon beforehand.

Im not arguing that you are wrong to disagree btw dude, just saying that people cant actually judge those involved.

 

[WillJ]

Originally posted by Kentonio
There is also the point that the effects of nuclear weapons had never been seen in actual action. Its one thing to test bombs out in the desert and study the effects and another to actual use them. One of the observers on board the Enola Gay for instance ended up becoming one of the worlds most dedicated peace protestors as a result of what he saw that day yet he had certainly seen the documentation on this weapon beforehand.

Im not arguing that you are wrong to disagree btw dude, just saying that people cant actually judge those involved.

That's a good point. And yes, I agree that we can't really judge the people involved, just agree or disagree with their actions.

 

[Deep_Thought76]

As awful as the bombings were, I think they were justified, at least in light of what we know today. From what I've read, I seriously doubt the Japanese would have surrendered easily. As for whether the war could have ended sooner if not for the allies' decision to seek only unconditional surrender, that's another topic altogether. You can understand their feelings, though, of not wanting to leave behind a problem that could rear its head again in a few years and start the war all over again. If you have your enemy in a bad position, pressing your advantage to force concessions is a logical response. Also, this isn’t a game of Warcraft3... You can’t just break your enemy’s power and starve them out, not without causing the same kind of suffering and civilian casualties the bombs did.

Finally, noone’s mentioned the other player in this war: Russia. Does anyone doubt that, given more time to shift troops east, Stalin wouldn’t have sent them in to Hokkaido and the northern parts of Japan? Or that he would have been a little reluctant to leave once those areas were under his control? Imagine what would have happened if we were left with a divided Japan as well as Germany! It’s impossible to say what the full consequences to the cold war would have been, but I doubt it would have been good, especially for the Japanese people. Products and cultural output from there have gained a lot of appreciation in the US, and a lot of it would never have been made if half the country was half communist.

So in the end, the bombs may have been the less cruel option. It is possible that they could have merely threatened with the second one, or dropped it on a high visibility/low population target, but we can’t second-guess them too much. Truman didn’t have much of an idea what was going on in their inner circles, any more than they knew whether he had more bombs up his sleeve.

 

[Toasty]

World History forum.

In the short term, it saved a lot of lives, and we've hardly had any nuclear catastrophies outside of Chernobyl since.

Still, it's not so much the dropping of the bomb, but the development of it in the first place.

 

[Richard III]

I would post here about this, but I've already done this subject about three times.

There should be a forum rule that redundant threads automatically start with a link to the old one so that we old folks don't have to re-express our arguments.



R.III

 

[Zarn]

It was justified. Japan refused to surrender. Bomb drops. Japan still refuses to surrender. Another one. Our bombing in Tokyo killed more, why aren't you complaining about that? A full scale invasion would have cost us alot. The Patriot military, the Japanese military, and the Japanese civilians all would have suffered much higher tolls.

 

[Zcylen]

I think conventional wars ended on august 6 1945, from that point forward we're just a step closer to our own destruction.
maybe in 1945 the bombs "were the only choice" I hope it really was

 

[Obssesed Nuker]

Well they coulkd have blown up Tokyo Bay. The Japenese leaders could NOT ignore a blast like that.

 

[SGI Butch]

After what Japan did in china and other countries I don't see how they can complain about the atomic bombs. THey weren't excactly angels. Civilian deaths cannot be avoided and their civilians were planning to fight us to the man if we invaded. It brought a quick end to the war. If Japan cared so much about the destruction they faced then they should have surrendered after the first bomb and not waited.