That was very well presented.

The alternative, as far as I am familiar with the counterargument to this viewpoint, would have been to loosen the requirement of "unconditional surrender" of Japan, and possibly to demonstrate the bomb by dropping it on an unpopulated area. Inviting Japanese scientists to a staging ground for a controlled demonstration was also on the books.

Now, assuming the US top brass were convinced Japan was not going to surrender, the argument presented here is quite valid. Bombing a live target certainly had the most shock value, and the bombs were likely in quite limited supply. (I confess, I don't know how many there were at the time.) A continued conventional war would have been horrendous.

But... Were the Japanese really unwilling to surrender, and if so, why? According to what I've read... Well, let me just quote the story, I've seen this in a number of texts:

"At the conclusion of the conference, Roosevelt and Churchill held a press conference. Roosevelt said that he and Churchill…

…were determined to accept nothing less than the unconditional surrender of Germany, Japan, and Italy…

Churchill said later that he was surprised by this statement. Churchill adds that he was told by Harry Hopkins that the President said to him:

…then suddenly the Press Conference was on, and Winston and I had had no time to prepare for it; and the thought popped into my mind that they had called Grant “Old Unconditional Surrender,” and the next thing I knew I had said it."

http://www.lewrockwell.com/2012/04/jonathan-goodwin/roosevelt-demands-unconditionalsurrender/

Another sad thought is that tens of thousands of innocent lives in Nagasaki would have been saved if Japan had surrendered after the first bomb was dropped.

The difference with Cuba was that neither side wanted to go to war, whereas it does seem war was Japan's preference.

I'm not sure the "not wanting to go to war" bit applies when you're already at war. At that point in the war, I suspect all parties still active in WW2 had serious regrets about getting involved in the first place. But that's spilt milk.

This kind of speaks to the time-specific nature of what kinds of judgements it's possible to make. It's easy to say, now, what would have been the best course of action for any player, but we all understand ours is not the perspective Truman or Hirohito had at the time.

Similarly, they would have had different perspectives before the war than in the middle of it. Japan was a willing participant in WW2 at the start, no question about that. The question is, once they were in it, and losing, what would it have taken to get them to surrender, and did anyone have the ability to know?

For a different view, check out Oliver Stone's documentary: Untold History of the United States

*related=http://videosift.com/video/Oliver-Stones-Untold-History-of-the-United-States-3-10

Indeed, history repeats itself as now Obama is claiming to be able to save Syrian lives by bombing away the evil, while critics point to the political and economical interests of USA and it's allies as the real reasons for the urge to drop the bombs. What would Jesus do? Take the (drone) joystick, of course.

Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States [3/10] has been added as a related post - related requested by Norsuelefantti.

Interesting video.

There is another side effect of actually using nuclear weapons on Japan. People got to see their effects, and that has since made them politically unpopular (rightly so).

Without that horrific demonstration, people, and consequently governments, might not have been so averse to deploying nuclear weapons since.

As I recall from studying this is a college class, we had only the two atomic bombs available. Getting material for another was possible, but I think I recall that at the time we could only collect enough for one bomb every several months.

So, a HUGE aspect of this is that we had a pretty good hand of cards in the poker game, but felt that we had to bluff to suggest that it was even more overwhelming.

To me, the interesting part of the debate isn't blockade vs conventional bombing vs invasion vs A-bombs. I think it gets most interesting to consider alternatives that involve dropping one or more of the 2 A-bombs some place where their power would be demonstrated, but where casualties would be as low as possible.

Either option you mentioned would have been GREAT, if they worked (and forced surrender). But both had potential pitfalls also. Drop one on an unpopulated area, and they might have believed we were trying to take credit for some sort of natural event (German V2s blowing up in London were often attributed to sewage gas explosions early on). Staging a demonstration for scientists and leaders to witness might have hardened their resolve and/or made them question ours.

If I had been in Truman's shoes, I feel like I would have preferred to use ONE of the two bombs on something like one of your suggestions; either unpopulated drop or demonstration. Then, use the second on a target of military significance if/when they didn't surrender.

However, in hindsight that would have been a risky move -- they didn't surrender after the Hiroshima bomb, only after both. Would a demonstration and one "we mean business" bomb have been enough to elicit the same response? Who knows. At that point, consider how screwed we could have been if it HADN'T, and it would have taken months to build another bomb (plus keep in mind that we weren't 100% confident in the bombs working reliably, even after trinity and the first two drops). I guess that we could have maintained a blockade and said "we'll give you 3 months to come to your senses" while we made another bomb, but I think that would have legitimately resulted in Japan questioning our resolve quite a lot; we'd be showing our cards too early.

I guess that at the end of the day, I don't envy Truman for having to make that kind of decision. Given the givens, I think that he probably played it as safe as possible and went with the option that was the MOST likely to force surrender. Perhaps some other option would have worked as well but avoided some of the casualties, but Truman took the information available to him and made the decision that he felt was the best -- I think that is pretty much the best we can ask of our leaders.

Prager University is not an accredited degree-granting university, its name has been criticized as misleading.

This is not someone I want to take a history lesson from.

@MilkmanDan if you'd have been Truman you'd most-likely have picked at least one of these two targets as both were of military industrial significance and Nagasaki was such as well as a major port. Another criteria with regards to studying the blast effects was that the city chosen must not have been heavily bombed previously-They wanted a clean pallet for this little masterpiece of destructive power...can't recall now but there was a list of about 10-12 targets to choose from.

As soon as I saw a collar of religion, I knew this was going to be swayed one direction and stopped. Religion scholars have no place in a video to be talking about why we dropped a nuke.

This is really crap.

This imperialist fuck's argument amounts to this:

1) The US will need to defeat Japan through military means
2) The US wants to avoid "another Okinawa" (with a quote from Truman)
3) The US needed to drop the atomic bomb

So, lets look first at that Okinawa analogy. Okinawa, as with other pacific islands, were particularly brutal because of both their strategic importance to the Pacific front as well as their terrain. Both because of they needed to be seized in order to cutoff mainland Japan (and isolate it) and their small, heavily dense terrain caused warfare to be at times hand-to-hand, the battles here were desperate and ugly.

This leads us to the next point: the whole presupposition with the imperialist fuck's argument is that there was no other way but occupation, in the form of Okinawa, to end Japan's empire.

This is false. The US had other options to end the war. Occupation of Japan wasn't a strategic necessity in the way occupation of the pacific islands was. The US could have maintained a bombing campaign while getting the rest of the world to pursue political/diplomatic talks with Japan.

The reason the US dropped the bombs wasn't to end the war (which was already war, de jure shit aside). It was to a) ensure supremacy over Japan (which isn't the same thing as ending a war) and b) to ensure global imperialist hegemony.

Amerikkka doesnt give a shit about saving lives. What about all the people firebombed in Dresden? What about all the imperialist adventures before and after WWII? Don't give me some ethical crap about a country, at least 1/4 of which was still under apartheid conditions, that wants to save lives because it respects human life so it drops atomic bombs on an already defeated people.

In terms of the US securing it's war prize of western europe, history suggests that the nuke was dropped primarily because the Soviet Union had an army that was in excess of 20 million soldiers and had just beaten nazi germany and taken half of europe. had the soviets decided to keep going the US would not have been able to stop them.
it had very little to do with defeating japan and everything to do with dominating global politics.

Know what else would have averted the need for a land invasion?

Accepting Japan's single-condition surrender.

Particularly since after Japan gave unconditional surrender, Japan was yielded their one original condition regardless

-scheherazade

Funnily enough, he didn't actually mention religion once.

But how very enlightened of you. Completely ignoring anything the man has to say because he's a priest. If he said water was wet, would you ignore that as well?

I'm not saying he's right or wrong, but you're displaying an attribute we expect from the religious nutjobs, ie. steadfast refusal to even consider the words of a person who doesn't share your viewpoint...

Why am I getting my American revisionist history from a priest?

I can't quite figure some of the aspects that outrage people over this. Some objections and concerns seem just very naive or ill informed.

Objecting to the goal of attaining absolute superiority over Japan just makes no sense to me. I mean, it is realized that it was a war being fought, for the presumed purpose of establishing superiority over each other? The difference between Japan being willing to surrender with a host of conditions versus unconditional surrender isn't trivial. Unless you want to fight another war later you want the ending to be decisive and sufficient to prevent it coming up again any time soon.

I also think the humanitarian outrage at, gasp, atomic bombs is terribly ill informed. The allies killed a lot more people in many other bombing campaigns and to much more brutal effect. It strikes me as misguided to be so focused on what is in many, many ways a lesser catastrophe than other attacks the allies made.

*dead

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