On August 6th 1945, The US dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima.
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Lead story on BBC this morning.
My Dad worked in Kure (naval port nearby) for the Brit garrison just after the Korean War. -
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Yes, likely a bit of a war crime really. Nagasaki more so.
I don't know how anyone can really only have anything other than mixed feelings about it. The Nuclear era is so all-encompassing.
If it hadn't had happened then at the end of the most brutal of wars would it have occurred at another point further down the line?. I'm not sure there's been a more influential event in human history, before or after.Comment
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There are still people who believe that this atrocity was a good thing. Somehow.Comment
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well it did have the desired effect, and gave johnny stalin a bit of something to think about, I say What.Comment
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"In July 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. The Secretary, upon giving me the news of the successful bomb test in New Mexico, and of the plan for using it, asked for my reaction, apparently expecting a vigorous assent.
During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face'. The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude..."
- Dwight Eisenhower.Comment
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What was the reason for bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
I mean, over Tokyo and Osaka or Yokohama or somewhere?
I mean, did they want to kill a load of people but not a shit load?Comment
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those other places were already a giant pile of cinders hobbes. You needed to have a fairly intact city in order to give the russians an idea about what this bomb could do. A nuclear bomb dropped on tokyo might not really have been noticed all that much. (indeed it's unclear if the nuclear bomb was that much worse than some of the fire storms whipped up by incendiary bombing
Eisenhower is being completely disingenuous there if he's letting on that he thought that bombing japan was about getting japan to surrender. The japanese were desperate to surrender to anyone that wasn't stalin.Comment
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Yeah, they'd firebombed the shit out of Tokyo and other major Japanese cities. Which killed as many people as the bomb did, if not more. Truman spent the rest of his life arguing that he saved lives by dropping the bomb, as a full-fledged invasion of Japan would have cost more lives than the bomb did.
My US History class in high school spent a good two days (three hours in total) debating whether we would drop the bomb and then had a poll. It was a tie.Comment
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Truman refused to bomb Kyoto or Tokyo because he wanted the bomb to be demonstrated on a predominantly military target. Hiroshima was a large embarkation port for the Japanese fleet, but he was clearly mistaken if he thought there would be no civilians there.Comment
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Well that's because you weren't arguing the real premise. if you were told that dropping this bomb would stop the russian horde from sweeping over continental europe with impunity, then you'd probably do it in a heart beat. The threat of global destruction is really awful, but it did keep us away from continent wide total warfare for 70 years at least.
it helped set clearly understood ground rules for the continuation of the Great GameComment
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I thought we'd already warned Uncle Joe off by reducing Dresden to rubble.Comment
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Well it's hard to say, but the atomic bomb was needed to redress the huge conventional advantage that the russians had in the European theatre. removing that advantage, and putting the instant incineration of moscow, on the list of possibilities allowed us to settle down to 50 years with a chain link fence keeping out the biggest army ever assembled.Comment
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My recollection is that three cities were considered as targets for bombing: Hiroshima, Nagasaki and Kokura, which is right in the north of Kyushu and therefore roughly halfway between H and N. It's also, by the by, about the ugliest place I've ever been to.Carnivorous Vulgaris wrote: Bombing Tokyo would also have meant killing the Emperor which was something they were keen to avoid given the status he held in Japanese society (that of a living god). They were worried at the prospect of getting the Japanese military to surrender and ensuring a compliant domestic populace without word from their leader. Hiroshima was a large industrial centre with shipyards, oil refineries and largely intact infrastructure. Plenty of damage to wreak.
Nagasaki was actually the secondary target for the bomb. The primary target, which may have been Osaka but I could be wrong, was obscured by clouds on the day of the bombing.
About the Emperor as god thing. I've told this story on OTF before, but someone who was a child in Hiroshima at the time of the bombing told me that when the Emperor came to visit the city in the aftermath, loads of people lined the, er, streets and they stood there for hours waiting for the cavalcade to come. Bear in mind that this was in the intense heat and humidity of a Japanese summer. Then when the cars came past, etiquette dictated that everyone avert their eyes to avoid looking directly at the person they'd waited hours in the burning hot sun to see. The person who told me this said there was lots of grumbling in the crowd about how stupid this was and she felt that, at least locally, this marked a sea change of how the Emperor was regarded.Comment
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Stalin sort of had a habit of claiming territory and mass murder, so to be very wary of an even wider invasion was a sensible enough presumption.Carnivorous Vulgaris wrote:Is there any evidence that they were planning to do so before the bomb was dropped?Originally posted by The Awesome Berbaslug!!!Comment
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Oh yes. Remember, to some people, the recent Women's World Cup final was revenge for Pearl Harbor.Toby Gymshorts wrote: There are still people who believe that this atrocity was a good thing. Somehow.
A few days ago someone tweeted a photo of Shigeki Tanaka, who won the Boston Marathon in 1951 having grown up not far from Hiroshima. Another Twitter user's response to the picture was, "Can't get them all."Comment
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Well yes and no. for the nuclear bomb to be a deterrent it has to be seen in action. Is stalin really going to be deterred by talk of a weapon that can vapourize an entire army in a second?Carnivorous Vulgaris wrote: The bomb may well have been needed to level the playing field for the Allies in Europe but the weapon's capabilities could have been demonstrated to the Soviets without sacrificing the innocent people who died in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. They didn't need to die as an act of sabre-rattling.
Also you have to consider that the people who were making this decision, were also killing tens of thousands of japanese people every day with conventional bombs. the damage done by the atomic bombs was not that much different to one of the particularly fierce firestorms that they whipped up in tokyo on a occasional basis.
their calculation was that they could drop these bombs, and prevent a war in europe that would claim as many lives in the first day. no this would work just as long as stalin didn't know that there were no more bombs, and that it would take ages to make another one.Comment
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There's also something of a logical break there, I think. If the atomic bomb dealt out more-or-less the same amount of damage as a firebombing using a fleet of conventional bombers then Stalin knew that the Allies were capable of doling out that level of ruin anyway. What difference would it have made to his and the Politburo's thinking if a single weapon could do the same? If anything, it's far easier to shoot down one plane that take out an entire squadron.
Well, the thing to remember here is numbers. The fat man bomb had the explosive force of 20,000 tons of tnt. That's equivalent to 2,222 b-29's, dropping their bombs simultaneously. and it was incredibly difficult to shoot down a b-29, particularly if it's just flying by itself.
the point about making a comparison with the fire bombings of tokyo, is just to illustrate that the people making the decision to drop the bomb, had already crossed that rubicon to do with incinerating large civilian populations. to them this was just another bombing raid, in which an awful lot of people would die.Comment
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It wasn't the overall damage or the volume of casualties.
It was the realisation that such carnage could be delivered instantly, by a single plane carrying a single bomb, whereas it had previously required massive squadrons and particular weather conditions.
This is one way that you can see the age difference between me and Flynnie. When I went to school, the mere suggestion that it was a bad idea wasn't broached until AP History.Comment
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Yes, I imagine the implied threat was more along the lines of, "We used to be able to destroy one city in a night with 2,000 planes. Now each plane can destroy its own city, and you won't stop all of them".Comment
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One also needs to remember that the Soviets were aware of the Manhattan Project and both the awe (and foreboding) that "success" inspired in its participants and the fact that this was not in any way a one off.Comment
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That's why I think that any monocausal theory is flawed (as they usually are).
The Soviet angle played a role, but so did the impact on the Japanese (especially w/r/t to post war relations), domestic public opinion (which both believed in American hegemony and saw it as making demobilisation reasonable) and the other (former) Great Powers.
There really were quite a lot of US politicians who genuinely believed that they could preserve the nuclear monopoly forever (or at least for their life times). US politicians tend not to be terribly intelligent as a class.Comment
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The russians also had almost no means of reliably detecting a b-29 at altitude before it was basically too late. and even if they did detect it, shooting one down was extremely difficult.Comment
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The Soviet angle played a role, but so did the impact on the Japanese (especially w/r/t to post war relations), domestic public opinion (which both believed in American hegemony and saw it as making demobilisation reasonable) and the other (former) Great Powers.
it certainly meant that there wasn't much room for the "stabbed in the back" narrative in post war japanese politics, like in weimar germany.Comment
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And as long as Comrade Dzugashvili wasn't in (or dangerously near) said city, does anyone think he'd be remotely bothered?Carnivorous Vulgaris wrote: That being the case, doesn't it reinforce the notion that dropping the bomb to scare the Soviets was a bad idea? If they knew about it and knew about its effectiveness then surely wouldn't someone have said as much to Stalin had he proposed extending the borders of the USSR to the French coast? "They possess a weapon that could devastate our cities and armies in minutes. If we invade Western Europe they'll use it." Not trying to appear belligerent here or anything, I'm genuinely interested in dissecting the rationale for the strategic decision to use the bomb.Comment
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