Why didn?t we warn Japan we would use the bomb if they didn?t surrender?
 

Or use it in a non or lesser populated area of japan, rather than on 80k civilians? At least the burden of all of those deaths would fall squarely on japan. i dont think the result would have been much different from our end, except that there is a chance, albeit small, that we could have saved those civilian lives.

Because Thats The Usa

we did . . . even dropped leaflets and told them to hit the road

Why didnt Japan warn the USA they would attack Pearl Harbor?

You dont think those deaths should be blamed on Japan?
Hint: They started the war.

i guess the 2 distinctions i see are, they attacked our military base vs. us bombing their cities, but i also understand there was a lot of anger there

also, as the premier world superpower, taking the higher road on killing their civilians, because i see similarities between that and iraq, im sure not all of their civilians supported the war, similar to here and now

Choice of targets
Map showing the locations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan where the two atomic weapons were employed.
Map showing the locations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan where the two atomic weapons were employed.

The Target Committee at Los Alamos on May 10?11, 1945, recommended Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, and the arsenal at Kokura as possible targets. The committee rejected the use of the weapon against a strictly military objective because of the chance of missing a small target not surrounded by a larger urban area. The psychological effects on Japan were of great importance to the committee members. They also agreed that the initial use of the weapon should be sufficiently spectacular for its importance to be internationally recognized. The committee felt Kyoto, as an intellectual center of Japan, had a population "better able to appreciate the significance of the weapon." Hiroshima was chosen because of its large size, its being "an important army depot" and the potential that the bomb would cause greater destruction because the city was surrounded by hills which would have a "focusing effect".[9]

Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson struck Kyoto from the list because of its cultural significance, over the objections of General Leslie Groves, head of the Manhattan Project. According to Professor Edwin O. Reischauer, Stimson "had known and admired Kyoto ever since his honeymoon there several decades earlier." On July 25 General Carl Spaatz was ordered to bomb one of the targets: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, or Nagasaki as soon after August 3 as weather permitted and the remaining cities as additional weapons became available.[10]

Hiroshima

Hiroshima during World War II

At the time of its bombing, Hiroshima was a city of some industrial and military significance. A number of military camps were located nearby, including the headquarters of the Fifth Division and Field Marshal Shunroku Hata's 2nd General Army Headquarters, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan. Hiroshima was a minor supply and logistics base for the Japanese military. The city was a communications center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops. It was one of several Japanese cities left deliberately untouched by American bombing, allowing an ideal environment to measure the damage caused by the atomic bomb. Another account stresses that after General Spaatz reported that Hiroshima was the only targeted city without prisoner of war (POW) camps, Washington decided to assign it highest priority.

ive been to pearl harbor and no shit ..u can actually see the oil mixed in the water still

its kind of sad too, when u see the list of all the americans who died, its a huge list, if u ever get a chance, u should visit and pay respect to all those who fought for our freedom

well said!

Well, we weren't even sure the bombs would work. Indeed they did, and haven't had to be used since.

The international impact cannot be understated. The U.S. was concerned that both the Germans and Russians had their own atomic weapons programs, and that before/after the fall of Germany, the possibility was strong that atomic scientists defected to the Soviet Union, just as many did to the U.S.

In the waning days of the war, both the U.S. and Russia moved fast to capture known Japanese research centers for Chemical and Biological warfare, such as those in Japanese-occupied Manchuria - not just to shut them down, but to retain the military scientific data for their own uses.

The U.S. could have detonated a test bomb with foreign observers in order to demonstrate their newly developed weaponary, but instead chose to actually bomb heavily populated civilian areas, as a warning to the rest of the world, as much as to press the Japanese into a quicker surrender.

ADH Webmaster

You are an idiot. How many more people would have died had the war continued?

one more thing . . . why is it that it took two bombs to get the Japanese to finally call it quits?

One might say, first time shame on us, second time shame on them.

give me a chance to refute those points

1 example would have been all it would have taken. once there are verified report of a bomb that can destroy 9 square miles and when threatening a populated area, the onus would be on japan to surrender or face the consequences

#2, if we were confident that the bomb would end the war, then using against a target with some military properties would not have made a difference

You didn't mention Japan for some reason.
They were working on the same weapon. We beat them to the punch.

japan rocks :thumbsup, I love sushi

Dude, we bombed Hiroshima and they still did not surrender. What kind of verified report do you think would make a greater impact than that?

We did not have "smart bombs" back then. Just because you tried to hit a base did not mean you would hit a base.

Very likely = not sure.

He's saying why didn't they use the nuke against a military target, rather than primarily civilian. It's a nuclear bomb, it didn't have to be "smart".

est. death toll of a land attack on Japan was over 1 million on the US side alone. Dropping the bombs SAVED lives on both sides.

Already addressed:

At the time of its bombing, Hiroshima was a city of some industrial and military significance. A number of military camps were located nearby, including the headquarters of the Fifth Division and Field Marshal Shunroku Hata's 2nd General Army Headquarters, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan. Hiroshima was a minor supply and logistics base for the Japanese military. The city was a communications center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops. It was one of several Japanese cities left deliberately untouched by American bombing, allowing an ideal environment to measure the damage caused by the atomic bomb. Another account stresses that after General Spaatz reported that Hiroshima was the only targeted city without prisoner of war (POW) camps, Washington decided to assign it highest priority.

If you can't equate industrial with military I have been giving you too much credit.

Children would have died either way. Alot more if we didnt drop the bombs.

You are a dolt. Do you think that only soldiers die in wars?

http://www.mythinglinks.org/Nurember...White~1945.jpg

Look how many civilian deaths occurred during the explosions -- it's clear that their goal was to cause an uproar among the citizens of Japan. They could have chosen other key targets that had a far less concentration of civilians but they wanted to kill as many as possible as quickly as possible.

the war in europe, and what Japan did to China. 20 million civilians dead in China alone at the hands of Japan.

Are you really this stupid, or do you just act this way on the Internet?

Of the estimated 2.6 million Japanese deaths in WWII, 600,000 were civilian.

Sure, but we did not know that at the time, it would have been a moral thing to do, imo

Im pretty fucking sure its not that hard to hit a military target with an atomic bomb, as long as the bomb lands within 5 miles of the target it will annihilate it, I mean, how strong can the wind be?

Most people forget that these "soldiers" were civilians before the war was started by Japan.

If we had attempted a land invasion of Japan, every Japanese citizen would have been a potential soldier . . . just look at Nazi Germany.

I know you're notabook, but try picking one up.

except we did not have enough uranium for 2 bombs, and prior experience fighting the Japanese on places like Guadacanal made it pretty apparent these guys were not just going to surrender. Fuck, even after Nagasaki they had military leaders that did not want to surrender and lose face.


Hiroshima was a military target, and it isn't like Japan has all this vacant acreage with no population around their military bases.

Potential* being the keyword. Many would argue that Japan was on the brink of surrendering without the advent of the atomic bombs being dropped. I believe that if they had dropped the bombs on strictly military targets, rather than the goal to maximize civilian casualties, the end results would have been virtually the same (minus the mass civilian deaths).

With an opportunity for them to surrender before using the second. They passed.

then why did it take a second bomb to get them to surrender?

Japan was warned by the President well before the first bomb was dropped.

funny that you morons pretend that a nation of Kamikazes fighting for the Emporer and empire who had a long, recent history of lashing out at and invading neighboring nations, comitting horrible acts of genocide who then attacked and invaded the USA... was someone who could be reasoned with - with a "warning"

Japan made a choice... they attacked and invaded the US.

hate the USA, i respect your opinion. but at least educate yourself on the issue, the timeline and keep the conversation in its proper perspective.

Very weak metaphor.

Hmmm... multitude of possibilities. It seems to give some credence that it was some sort of timetable rather than a second bomb that caused the surrender, however. If we could vaporize one city instantaneously did they magically think we could not do another? No.. that would be silly. A second bomb shouldn?t have had that much more of an impact than the first.

it ended the war, that's good enough for me

Note that Tokyo wasn't bombed.

50 kaboooooooooms!

they were considering surrender terms

maybe this will help some of you fools to gain a little perspective on the actual climate and attitude of Japan at the time

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes


Because of the sheer scale of suffering caused by the Japanese military during the 1930s and 1940s, it is often compared to the military of Nazi Germany during 1933?45. The historian Chalmers Johnson has written that:

It may be pointless to try to establish which World War Two Axis aggressor, Germany or Japan, was the more brutal to the peoples it victimised. The Germans killed six million Jews and 20 million Russians [i.e. Soviet citizens]; the Japanese slaughtered as many as 30 million Filipinos, Malays, Vietnamese, Cambodians, Indonesians and Burmese, at least 23 million of them ethnic Chinese. Both nations looted the countries they conquered on a monumental scale, though Japan plundered more, over a longer period, than the Nazis. Both conquerors enslaved millions and exploited them as forced labourers ? and, in the case of the Japanese, as [forced] prostitutes for front-line troops. If you were a Nazi prisoner of war from Britain, America, Australia, New Zealand or Canada (but not Russia) you faced a 4 % chance of not surviving the war; [by comparison] the death rate for Allied POWs held by the Japanese was nearly 30 %.[5]

Mass killings

R. J. Rummel, a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, states that between 1937 and 1945, the Japanese military "murdered near 3,000,000 to over 10,000,000 people, most probably 6,000,000 Chinese, Indonesians, Koreans, Filipinos, and Indochinese, among others, including Western prisoners of war. This democide was due to a morally bankrupt political and military strategy, military expediency and custom, and national culture."[6]

In China alone, during 1937-45, approximately 3.9 million Chinese were killed, mostly civilians as a direct result of the Japanese invasion.[7] The most infamous incident during this period was the Nanjing Massacre of 1937-38, when, according to the findings of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, the Japanese Army massacred as many as 260,000 civilians and prisoners of war.[8] Herbert Bix, citing the works of Mitsuyoshi Himeta and Akira Fujiwara, claims that the "Three Alls Policy" (Sankō Sakusen) a scorched earth strategy used by Japanese forces in China in 1942-45, and sanctioned by Hirohito himself, was in itself responsible for the deaths of 2.7 million Chinese civilians. The mystery behind Hirohito's role is explained in the authoritative book by David Bergamini, who translated war diaries and depositions from the tribunals from the original Japanese, and interviewed sources directly.

Forced labour

The Japanese military's use of forced labour, by Asian civilians and POWs also caused many deaths. According to a joint study by historians including Zhifen Ju, Mitsuyoshi Himeta, Toru Kubo and Mark Peattie, more than 10 million Chinese civilians were mobilized by the Kôa-in (Japanese Asia Development Board) for forced labour. [21] More than 100,000 civilians and POWs died in the construction of the Burma-Siam Railway.

The U.S. Library of Congress estimates that in Java, between four and 10 million romusha (Japanese: "manual laborer"), were forced to work by the Japanese military.[22] About 270,000 of these Javanese laborers were sent to other Japanese-held areas in South East Asia. Only 52,000 were repatriated to Java, meaning that there was a death rate of 80%.

The Geneva Convention exempted POWs of sergeant rank or higher from manual labour, and stipulated that prisoners performing work should be provided with extra rations and other essentials. According to historian Akira Fujiwara, Emperor Hirohito personally ratified the decision to remove the constraints of international law on the treatment of Chinese prisoners of war in the directive of 5 August 1937. This notification also advised staff officers to stop using the term "prisoners of war".[23] During World War II, such rules were largely respected in German POW camps, except in the case of Soviet POWs. However, Japan was not a signatory to the Geneva Convention at the time, and Japanese forces did not follow the convention.


Official apologies

The Japanese government considers that the legal and moral positions in regard to war crimes are separate. Therefore, while maintaining that Japan violated no international law or treaties, Japanese governments have officially recognised the suffering which the Japanese military caused, and numerous apologies have been issued by the Japanese government. For example, Prime Minister Tomiichi Murayama, in August 1995, stated that Japan "through its colonial rule and aggression, caused tremendous damage and suffering to the people of many countries, particularly to those of Asian nations", and he expressed his "feelings of deep remorse" and stated his "heartfelt apology". Also, on September 29, 1972, Japanese Prime Minister Kakuei Tanaka stated, "The Japanese side is keenly conscious of the responsibility for the serious damage that Japan caused in the past to the Chinese people through war, and deeply reproaches itself."

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedi...ffleet.jpgadfs

I think Tokyo was already destroyed... they fire bombed the shit out of it.

if memory serves me correctly, Tokyo was a primary target that was passed over due to heavy cloud cover. either Nagasaki or Hiroshima was a secondary target.

it was not a specific warning, but a vague one, although it was a warning




The Potsdam Declaration outlining terms of surrender for Japan:

"...The might that now converges on Japan is immeasurably greater than that which, when applied to the resisting Nazis, necessarily laid waste to the lands, the industry and the method of life of the whole German people. The full application of our military power, backed by our resolve, will mean the inevitable and complete destruction of the Japanese armed forces and just as inevitably the utter devastation of the Japanese homeland..."

"...We call upon the government of Japan to proclaim now the unconditional surrender of all Japanese armed forces, and to provide proper and adequate assurances of their good faith in such action. The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction."

An unknown number of survivors from the Hiroshima bombing made their way to Nagasaki and were bombed again.[9]("Nine Who Survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki", Robert Trumbull, 1957).



that would suck

Hey, we were just as surprised as they were when the shit actually worked.

aha!!!

took me a fucking hour to find it, but here:


The United States expected to have another atomic bomb ready for use in the third week of August, with three more in September and a further three in October.[33]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_...a_and_Nagasaki

I just have two words to say about that: Fucked Up.

"Hey guys... we just got bombed the fuck up... where can we go? Let's go to Nagasaki, that place looks safe!" Jesus.

The whole reason the bomb had to be used was that the Japanese had the same mind set as the Nazis. They believed that they where the superior race and that they should rule the world. They would not give up for anything. If not for the bomb the war would have gone on for another year or even 2 or 3.