Was talking to a friend of mine about the use of nukes and I was told about how it was the quicker way to save more lives. I’ve always heard this argument but still always believed that it was an extreme response that could have been avoided.
Am I naive in my thoughts here? What is everyone else’s interpretation of the events leading up to and the decision made to drop both bombs?
there’s a pretty reasonable moral angle here about the utilitarianism behind that argument if they’re not going to budge on the ‘nukes saved lives’ thing which is already a contentious assertion, if you want to think about that.
i’m not sure exactly how one is meant to quantify ‘lives saved’ or even be able to conclude that the nukes were a net ‘save’ in lives, and obviously part of that calculus is making a value judgement on the lives of american soldiers vs japanese civilians that should be pretty problematic if you examine that.
a lot of other people have stressed the historical reasons why the nukes were bad which are in my view closer to the truth, but again, if they won’t budge on that, then yea.
if they decide to push back on revisionist historical arguments they’re likely going to have a few of these arguments, since this subject has been covered at length:
The USSR wasn’t a credible threat to the Home Islands and didn’t have the capabilities to launch any major amphibious assaults. The RKKA occupied the Kurils, but they weren’t anywhere near capable of invading more well defended areas.
Alternatives to forcing a surrender with the bomb would have caused more deaths
Domestic pressure to end the War ASAP rather than intimidating the USSR was the main goal
The IJA was so dead-set on fighting only the nukes could have forced a conditional surrender without mass casualties in an invasion
note that 2. and 4. are speculative. relying on predicted consequences to vindicate an atrocity in the present feels like a form of moral escapism. you’re avoiding reckoning with the concrete reality and human toll of one’s actions by appealing to abstract hypotheticals, it’s very dubious morally and we have empirical evidence that the US armed forces didn’t fully buy point 4 either.
you can chalk it up to usual military dissent or whatever, but i think it’s worth noting that it’s the air force officers who were most in favour.
Nimitz, USN: “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”
MacArthur, US Army: “My staff was unanimous in believing that Japan was on the point of collapse and surrender.”
Eisenhower, SHAEF: “I was against it on two counts. First, the Japanese were ready to surrender, and it wasn’t necessary to hit them with that awful thing. Second, I hated to see our country be the first to use such a weapon.”
Leahy, USN: “It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender.”
Curtis LeMay, USAAF: “I think it was a wise decision, and I’d do it again under similar circumstances.” and “There are no innocent civilians. It is their government and you are fighting a people, you are not trying to fight an armed force anymore. So it doesn’t bother me so much to be killing the so-called innocent bystanders.”
big proponents of the bombings other than LeMay were Marshall, who was pretty much the architect of western allied strategy and was certainly thinking of post-war soviet containment, manhattan project director leslie groves who needed to justify the whole venture, and generally the political/institutional side of this decision-making process. the air force had a vested interest in demonstrating the power of a-bombs, that would justify more funding to their end. obviously you can argue the opposite, that nimitz and leahy obviously would want to play up the effects of naval blockade and their absolute shattering of the IJN in 1944, but army staff holding that they were also liable to surrender is kind of the tiebreaker here, especially given a lot of the narrative around the atomic bombings is based on the speculation of how costly a home islands amphibious invasion would be.
i would personally speculate that either the comments from various officers saying they privately disliked the bombings were either covering their asses post-war or more damningly an example of groupthink in the american decision making process where they all assumed everybody else supported the a-bomb and therefore kept their dissent down. eisenhower was the only one other than leahy from this group that actually expressed their opposition, but this is kind of all a detour from the main point that: a) the military side of the decision making process probably understood better the likelihood of japanese capitulation b) the military side did not push nearly as hard for the a-bomb as the civilian side
it’s also not particularly important that the RKKA wasn’t capable of threatening amphibious operations since the significance of the USSR to Imperial Japan was as a neutral party to negotiate peace. you could also argue that the kwantung army was mostly underequipped, understaffed and undertrained at this point in the war but it’s excessively revisionist to claim that august storm wasn’t a significant degradation in the IJA’s ability to sustain and prosecute a land war.
i think the problematic moral implications of point 3 are clear enough.