Atomic Bombings Debate

This is not true, serious military figures in the US armed forces concluded that Japan was utterly defeated and was making peace feelers. They were basically defenseless at that stage of the war, against the bombing raids.The civilian massacre could have been prevented by merely demonstrating the bomb. However they chose to experiment by dropping it on an city.

> Whereas Japan would’ve continued the war and brought it back to the US mainland eventually.This is simply ahistoric.Japan was on the brink of loss and everyone knew it (including all of Japan's military and political leaders) -- Japan was already suing for peace long before the bombs were dropped. The main sticking point was the conditions of surrender and the Japanese were deluded (partially by the US, intentionally or not) into thinking Russia could get them more favourable sur

I think there is maybe a middle ground.It is entirely possible that the decision to drop the bomb was made in good faith, but that the Japanese were already committed to surrender. The fog of war is very real (as this month has reminded us).In context, the Hiroshima bombing wasn't the most deadly or the most destructive bombing of the war. The Tokyo firebombing takes that honor. Given that the US Army was in the habit of wiping cities off the map at will BEFORE Hiroshima, I wonder how

The article's 5th paragraph says it all. From today's perspective, Japan's defeat in the war is obvious. But Japan's leaders still needed an eye-opener then. One bomb obliterated an entire city, and they were still deliberating about the possibility of surrender?About the bomb, it's not a question of necessity, but of economics. That was a time of war. American forces beat the enemy every step of the way in the Pacific. The Allies may have enough power to bring Japan down to its knees during

Yes, that's a fact. I can't tell whether you approve of that or not, but here's the background.After the failure of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of of WW1, resulting in WW2, the Allies learned that unconditional surrender was needed to prevent future wars.The Japanese military command preferred that their troops never surrender.So the 2 options the US had were:1) Curtis LeMay would use 10,000 bombers to napalm those cities, and every last village in Japan.2)

But by that point in WW2, the US was pretty confident that it would defeat Japan. The atomic bombs were dropped to avoid a potentially costly invasion, and to end the war before the Russians could reach Japan and spread their influence. Imperial Japan did some awful things, but those actions by themselves could never morally justify the indiscriminate slaughter of 50,000 civilians.

This counterfactual loses much of its appeal when you learn that Japan was beaten and had been trying, through back channels, to conditionally surrender for months prior to the bombing. Their sole condition was guaranteed safety for the Emperor: the US refused to grant this, and so the fighting continued.As history shows, the US had no intention of harming the emperor -- so why wouldn't it accept this condition? And why did it target civilians, rather than (as the Los Alamos scientists h

You really should read the debate about the bombing:- https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-jap...- http://www.abc.net.au/news&#

It's still not 100% clear if the nuclear bombing was necessary to force the Japanese to surrender, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria could have been enough, making the civilian casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki pointless victims.

Japan was never going to surrender. They were going to fight until the end. More lives would have been lost. The bomb saved lives.