A grim anniversary
Today is the 75th anniversary of the Hiroshima bomb.
I grew up in Oak Ridge, TN, a city that was founded in secret for the purpose of enriching uranium for atomic bombs. The Hiroshima bomb was a uranium fission atomic bomb.
The idea of immolating thousands of civilians was not novel at that point. See, e.g., the Dresden and Tokyo firebombings. Hiroshima was certainly a valid military target.
One counterfactual argument is that, had the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki not occurred, millions of deaths, Japanese and Americans, would have occurred before Japan surrendered. Another counterfactual argument is that Japan would have surrendered if only a demonstration bomb had been detonated, since the Soviet Union was on the point of invading from the west.
As an ardent consumer of history, I believe it is important to avoid “presentism,” the impulse to judge the behavior of people in the past by present standards. From my reading of the history, I have to agree with Truman’s decision.
And in the words of Gen W.T. Sherman: “War is cruelty. There is no use trying to reform it. The crueler it is, the sooner it will be over.”
That’s history. What about the present?
Now we see the mad logic of war at work in Israel. It could step back from the brink of regional war, including nuclear under its Samson doctrine if it loses, but the zero-sum mindset has hardened and won’t allow it. The US is being pulled into it by a similar logic: defend Israel even if it brings havoc upon itself.
As a retired cold warrior, with technical service not a flier in both defense and air breathing offense, I care a lot about those attacks several years before my birth.
Nuclear war is unwinnable! Evil!
The Sampson response is unknown as to strategy, and tactics. It looks like mutual assured destruction between Israel and Iran.
If they use numbers of surface or subsurface burst the effects on the rest of the world will extreme.
Aside: we had a few former missile launch officer around after their limits reached on alert. They were all certified sane…..
The Geneva Convention was agreed to in 1949, after WWII, prohibiting, among other things, targeting civilian populations, were a reaction to the events of WWII. Parties to the convention have no right to point to WWII behavior as a justification for actions today.
Had the U.S. and Great Britain lost WW II Bomber Harris and Curtis LeMay would have been hanged, justly deserved.
You don’t think their actions were provoked by things like the London blitz and Japanese actions in Manchuria and Korea, among others. Or do you just mean that winners rule?
The paradox had long been, why did Japan surrender when nuclear weapons were used against them, given that beginning in March 1945, U.S. conventional bombing against Japanese cities had killed more than 330,000 civilians, wounded 472,000, made more than 8 million homeless, and burned more than 177 square miles of urban areas – and yet Japan didn’t surrender. The resolution to this problem, by Ward Wilson in his 2007 paper “The Winning Weapon: Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima,” is that it was the Russian entry into the war against Japan, not the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, that caused Japan to surrender. But despite the strong endorsement of Wilson’s paper by Freeman Dyson and others, it seems that not many people are aware of it. A pity. It can be found and downloaded from here https://www.academia.edu/68088474/The_Winning_Weapon
@Bob,
Yes, I mentioned the Wilson argument as the second counterfactual. I’ve been aware of the speculation for decades. I suspect it wasn’t given much credence in America because of the need to believe that all allied agency belonged to the US side.
Your statement of the second counterfactual, “that Japan would have surrendered if only a demonstration bomb had been detonated, since the Soviet Union was on the point of invading from the west” isn’t really the Wilson argument, although perhaps you were aware of the Wilson argument. The demonstration bomb proposal, e.g. the “Franck Report” submitted by Arthur Compton to the Secretary of War in June, 1945 https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/nukevault/ebb525-The-Atomic-Bomb-and-the-End-of-World-War-II/documents/022.pdf makes no mention of a forthcoming Soviet invasion – not surprising since the Yalta Conference agreement that the Soviets would attack “two or three months after Germany has surrendered” was not publicly known. And Wilson’s paper argues that the Soviet declaration of war on Japan was the sole cause of Japan’s surrender.
@Bob,
“And Wilson’s paper argues that the Soviet declaration of war on Japan was the sole cause of Japan’s surrender.”
Yep. And that’s what I meant by counterfactual. In the absence of the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, would the Soviet declaration been sufficient? You don’t know. I don’t know. Wilson doesn’t know. The Soviets had been in conflict with Japan for years.
It’s an interesting and compelling argument, but that’s all it is.