In hindsight sixty years after the fact, we cannot judge why the US dropped nuclear bombs on Japan in the 1940s. It was a very different time, the world was in a different place; The world had been at war for almost a decade and millions upon millions were being slaughtered.
People are horrified that over three thousand US soldiers have been killed in Iraq. Compare this to five thousand in one day on one island in the South Pacific ( Iwo Jima ).
It was a different time and a war the likes of which we have never seen since. There was no smart bombs. Read the Geneva that was in place at the time of WWII; If a city had a any type of military outpost it was considered fair game. Because of the weapons of that time, it was common to bomb entire cities, destroying them.
In today's world nuclear weapons are considered "bad" and "evil". But during WWII the object was to destroy, not select worthy targets. The US sent out fleets of bombers, sometimes two hundred bombers at a time, to attack cities. More people died in such single bombing missions than died from a single nuclear attack....
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Originally Posted by L-Pink
Japanese civilian deaths .....
Nagasaki ... about 50,000 nuclear
Hiroshima ... about 125,000 nuclear
Tokoyo ... about 125,000 fire-bombing
Conventional bombing would have eventually killed far more, nuclear got their attention and everything ended sooner.
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The end goal of the nuclear bomb was, in simple terms, to big a bigger bomb.
And the Emperor did want to surrender.....
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Originally Posted by Splum
THEIR timetable? The Emperor WANTED to give up but his military wouldnt let him! Besides usually the surrendering party immediately surrenders after something of that magnitude, what we should wait to make an appointment of surrender?  |
In fact, the Emperor made a recording stating he wanted to surrrender, and the military stormed the palace and took control of the country. ( I don't remember if this was shortly before the first bomb or shortly after.)
The Japanese were rather brutal warriors. They would kill themselves before surrendering. Civilians as well - They would rather kill themselves before accepting American occupation.
The US was planning to invade the mainland of Japan. Based on what the US had learned while fighting from island to island across the South Pacific, the US knew that this would be a long and costly battle. It's possible that more Japanese would have died in fighting on the mainland than died with the two bombs that were dropped on two cities.
Was a warning issued? I've been reading about WWII for twenty years and never heard they were warned. This doesn't bother me; None of the countries warned others they were attacking a certain city and when 100k people died in coventional bombing and no one really lost sleep over it.
But the most interesting part of the entire story is the honor of the Japanese people. They lost the war - for a large number of reasons - but still held their head guy and accepted the defeat. Look at Japan now. One can even question who really came out on top.