The Nuking of Nagasaki: Even More Immoral and Unnecessary than Hiroshima

[mikegriffith1]

Yes it’s immature and idealistic to condemn the wanton slaughter of defenseless civilians. LOL!

The people of Germany weren't "innocent". They were the one's who supported Adolf Hitler. They were the one's who rallied for Adolf Hitler. They were the one's who voted for Adolf Hitler.

Same with Japan. Same with China. Same with Iran.

I'd tell you to think, but you're clearly not capable.

Let’s do a little thought experiment. W invades Iraq and caused possibly as many as one million deaths of mostly civilians (no doubt this makes you so proud). Let’s say Iraq manages to beat back the invasion and ultimately invades the US homeland. Since Americans elected W, you think the Iraqi armed forces are justified in mass murdering American civilians. Do you see your foolish thinking?

Bullseye. You've identified one of the main problems with the militaristic logic that we're seeing from the FDR-Truman apologists. If we were justified in killing at least half a million Japanese civilians because some Japanese soldiers committed war crimes, then Iraq would have been entirely justified, by this logic, in killing hundreds of thousands of American civilians if they had managed to invade America.

 

[P@triot]

...but your "official position" seems to be that it was just fine that FDR saved the Soviet Union twice, that FDR sided with the Soviets in China by funneling aid to the Chinese Nationalists (who were also receiving Soviet aid), that FDR condemned Japan's move into China but said nothing about the fact that that move was done in large part to counter the Soviets' efforts to strengthen their influence in China...

Reading isn't your strong point, uh? FDR was a piece of shit who destroyed the U.S. Constitution. But that being said, nothing he did with regards to Japan warranted them dropping bombs on us. Nothing.

Only an asshole would argue that exercising a nation's sovereign freedom to help - or deny help - to anyone they so choose, warrants being bombed.

 

[P@triot]

Let’s do a little thought experiment. W invades Iraq and caused possibly as many as one million deaths of mostly civilians (no doubt this makes you so proud). Let’s say Iraq manages to beat back the invasion and ultimately invades the US homeland. Since Americans elected W, you think the Iraqi armed forces are justified in mass murdering American civilians.

Abso...fucking...lutely. You're dumb ass doesn't?!? Holy shit. You are the most immature idealist I've ever come across.

I have to assume you are about 6 years old or so. Because nobody above that age would be completely ignorant of the concept of war (which is to kill as many of your enemy as possible).

 

[P@triot]

If we were justified in killing at least half a million Japanese civilians because some Japanese soldiers committed war crimes, then Iraq would have been entirely justified, by this logic, in killing hundreds of thousands of American civilians if they had managed to invade America.

Hey parrot....

A. Iraq would absolutely be justified

B. Attempting to compare FDR denying trade with Japan to Saddam brutally murdering millions and invading other nations is a special kind of stupid. So tired of you leftist supporting brutal regimes while simultaneously attempting to paint the U.S. as the "evil" empire.

Would love to see your soft, coddled ass make it one day in another nation. You'd be curled up in the fetal position crying like a little bitch.

 

[HenryBHough]

The way the EU is headed - jonesing to become the new Nazi Nation - maybe nuking Brussels might not be a bad idea.

 

[P@triot]

Let’s do a little thought experiment. W invades Iraq and caused possibly as many as one million deaths of mostly civilians (no doubt this makes you so proud). Let’s say Iraq manages to beat back the invasion and ultimately invades the US homeland. Since Americans elected W, you think the Iraqi armed forces are justified in mass murdering American civilians.

Do you see your foolish thinking?

Allow me to do an actual "thought experiment" (ask an adult for help here):

You neighbor comes over and asks to borrow your lawnmower. You say "no". You then believe your neighbor would be 100% justified in coming into your home in the middle of the night, while you slept, and brutally murdered your wife, your 5 year old daughter, and your 8 month old infant son.

Yes folks...that is literally the argument gipper and mikegriffith1 have made in this thread.

 

[gipper]

Let’s do a little thought experiment. W invades Iraq and caused possibly as many as one million deaths of mostly civilians (no doubt this makes you so proud). Let’s say Iraq manages to beat back the invasion and ultimately invades the US homeland. Since Americans elected W, you think the Iraqi armed forces are justified in mass murdering American civilians.

Do you see your foolish thinking?

Allow me to do an actual "thought experiment" (ask an adult for help here):

You neighbor comes over and asks to borrow your lawnmower. You say "no". You then believe your neighbor would be 100% justified in coming into your home in the middle of the night, while you slept, and brutally murdered your wife, your 5 year old daughter, and your 8 month old infant son.

Yes folks...that is literally the argument gipper and mikegriffith1 have made in this thread.

LOL. Now that is really dumb.

Apparently you don’t know how dumb. LOL.

 

[gipper]

Let’s do a little thought experiment. W invades Iraq and caused possibly as many as one million deaths of mostly civilians (no doubt this makes you so proud). Let’s say Iraq manages to beat back the invasion and ultimately invades the US homeland. Since Americans elected W, you think the Iraqi armed forces are justified in mass murdering American civilians.

Abso...fucking...lutely. You're dumb ass doesn't?!? Holy shit. You are the most immature idealist I've ever come across.

I have to assume you are about 6 years old or so. Because nobody above that age would be completely ignorant of the concept of war (which is to kill as many of your enemy as possible).

Yes you believe as the Nazis, Imperial Japanese, Soviets did. Kill innocent women and children ruthlessly and relentlessly. Kill them all.

You’re so dumb you don’t know how dumb that is.

 

[gipper]

Yes it’s immature and idealistic to condemn the wanton slaughter of defenseless civilians. LOL!

The people of Germany weren't "innocent". They were the one's who supported Adolf Hitler. They were the one's who rallied for Adolf Hitler. They were the one's who voted for Adolf Hitler.

Same with Japan. Same with China. Same with Iran.

I'd tell you to think, but you're clearly not capable.

Let’s do a little thought experiment. W invades Iraq and caused possibly as many as one million deaths of mostly civilians (no doubt this makes you so proud). Let’s say Iraq manages to beat back the invasion and ultimately invades the US homeland. Since Americans elected W, you think the Iraqi armed forces are justified in mass murdering American civilians. Do you see your foolish thinking?

Bullseye. You've identified one of the main problems with the militaristic logic that we're seeing from the FDR-Truman apologists. If we were justified in killing at least half a million Japanese civilians because some Japanese soldiers committed war crimes, then Iraq would have been entirely justified, by this logic, in killing hundreds of thousands of American civilians if they had managed to invade America.

The thing is they are so slanted they don’t understand the consequences of their horrendous beliefs.

 

[mikegriffith1]

Reading isn't your strong point, uh? FDR was a piece of crap who destroyed the U.S. Constitution. But that being said, nothing he did with regards to Japan warranted them dropping bombs on us. Nothing.

Only a butthole would argue that exercising a nation's sovereign freedom to help - or deny help - to anyone they so choose, warrants being bombed.

One, I notice you again avoid the point that we know that FDR wanted the Japanese to attack. Two, I don't think you are aware of everything FDR was doing to provoke Japan to war. In his monograph Japan’s Decision for War in 1941: Some Enduring Lessons (U.S. Army War College, 2009), Dr. Jeffrey Record, a professor at the Air War College, makes some important points about Japan’s reasons for deciding to wage war on the U.S. and the role that FDR’s draconian sanctions played in that decision. Surprisingly, Dr. Record also notes that FDR’s sanctions and demands would have been viewed as unacceptable to the U.S. if a foreign power had done them to us. Says Dr. Record,

The United States was, in effect, demanding that Japan renounce its status as an aspiring great power and consign itself to permanent strategic dependency on a hostile Washington. Such a choice would have been unacceptable to any great power. Japan’s survival as a major industrial and military power was a stake— far more compelling reasons for war than the United States later advanced for its disastrous wars of choice in Vietnam and Iraq. Would the United States ever have permitted a hostile power to wreck its foreign commerce and strangle its domestic economy without a resort to war? (p. 21, https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pdffiles/pub905.pdf).​

I will quote this paragraph again as the final paragraph in the following rather long extract from Dr. Record’s monograph:

It is the central conclusion of this monograph that the Japanese decision for war against the United States in 1941 was dictated by Japanese pride and the threatened economic destruction of Japan by the United States. The United States sought to deter Japanese imperial expansion into Southeast Asia by employing its enormous leverage over the Japanese economy; it demanded that Japan withdraw its forces from both Indochina and China—in effect that Japan renounce its empire in exchange for a restoration of trade with the United States and acceptance of American principles of international behavior. Observed Sir Basil Henry Liddell Hart in retrospect: “No Government, least of all the Japanese, could be expected to swallow such humiliating conditions, and utter loss of face.”

This conclusion excuses neither the attack on Pearl Harbor nor the stupidity of Tokyo’s statecraft in the 1930s. . . .​

Nor does this monograph’s thesis excuse the savagery of Japanese behavior in East Asia during the 1930s and 1940s. . . .​

All that said, however, it is necessary to observe that the United States was also guilty of grievous miscalculation in the Pacific in 1941. It takes at least two parties to transform a political dispute into war. Racism was hardly unique to the Japanese, and Americans were, if anything, even more culturally ignorant of Japan than the Japanese were of the United States. The conviction, widespread within the Roosevelt administration until the last months of 1941, that no sensible Japanese leader could rationally contemplate war with the United States, blinded key policymakers to the likely consequences of such reckless decisions as the imposition of what amounted to a complete trade embargo of Japan in the summer of 1941. The embargo abruptly deprived Japan of 80 percent of its oil requirements, confronting Tokyo with the choice of either submitting to U.S. demands that it give up its empire in China and resume its economic dependency on the United States or, alternatively, advancing into resource-rich Southeast Asia and placing its expanded empire on an economically independent foundation. The embargo thus provoked rather than cowed Japan. David Kahn has observed that:​

American racism and rationalism kept the United States from thinking that Japan would attack it. . . . Japan was not only more distant [than Germany]; since she had no more than half America’s population and only one-ninth of America’s industrial output, rationality seemed to preclude her attacking the United States. And disbelief in a Japanese attack was reinforced by belief in the superiority of the white race. Americans looked upon Japanese as bucktoothed, bespectacled little yellow men, forever photographing things with their omnipresent cameras so they could copy them. Such opinions were held not only by common bigots but by opinion makers as well.​

The issue of “rationality” is a false one. Cultures as disparate as those of the United States and Japan in the 1930s defy a common standard of rationality. Rationality lies in the eyes of the beholder, and “rational” leaders can make horribly mistaken decisions. American examples include the Truman administration’s decision to cross the 38th Parallel in Korea in 1950, which witlessly provoked an unnecessary war with China; the Johnson administration’s decision to commit U.S. ground combat forces to South Vietnam’s defense in 1965; and the George W. Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq in 2003. . . .​

Japan’s decision for war was made after months of agonizing internal debate by leaders who recognized America’s vast industrial superiority and who, in the more sober moments, suffered few illusions about Japan’s chances in a protracted war against America. Japan’s leaders did not want war with the United States, but by the fall of 1941 few saw any acceptable alternative to war. They believed that Japan’s invasion of British- and Dutch-controlled Southeast Asia would mean war with the United States, and they resigned themselves to it. . . .​

Roosevelt viewed the Soviet Union as an indispensable belligerent against Hitler and took the threat of a Japanese invasion of Siberia from Manchuria quite seriously; there is even evidence that he deliberately stiffened U.S. policy toward Japan in the wake of Germany’s invasion of Russia for the purpose of encouraging the Japanese to look south rather than north. . . .​

The Roosevelt administration was well aware that Japan imported 90 percent of its oil, of which 75-80 percent was from the United States (which in 1940 accounted for an astounding 63 percent of the world’s output of petroleum). Roosevelt also knew that the Dutch East Indies, which produced 3 percent of the world’s output, was the only other convenient oil producer that could meet Japan’s import needs.​

The freeze order was the culmination of a program of sanctioning Japan for its aggression in China that began in January 1940 with the U.S. withdrawal from its 1911 commercial treaty with Japan (notice of abrogation was given in July 1939). Sanctioning escalated in July 1940 with the passage of the National Defense Act, which granted the administration authority to ban or restrict the export of items declared vital to national defense. On July 25 Roosevelt announced a ban on Japanese acquisition of U.S. high-octane aviation gasoline, certain grades of steel and scrap iron, and some lubricants. In September the White House imposed a ban on all scrap iron exports to Japan. Because the Japanese steel industry was highly dependent on imported scrap iron from the United States, the ban compelled Japan to draw down its stockpiles and operate its steel industry well below capacity; indeed, the ban blocked any significant expansion of Japanese steel production during the war.33 In December the embargo was expanded to include iron ore, steel, and steel products, and the following month expanded to include copper (of which the United States supplied 80 percent of Japan’s requirements), brass, bronze, zinc, nickel, and potash. “Almost every week thereafter other items were added to the list, each of which was much needed for Japanese industrial production”. . . .​

But, as Roosevelt understood, it was Japan’s oil dependency on the United States, a dependency, ironically, that had deepened with Japan’s expanding military operations in China, that constituted the real hangman’s noose around Japan’s neck. . . .​

The result, in conjunction with the seizure of Japanese assets by Great Britain and the Netherlands, was a complete suspension of Japanese economic access to the United States and the destruction of between 50 and 75 percent of Japan’s foreign trade.41 In early November 1941, Joseph Grew, the U.S. ambassador to Japan, cabled Secretary of State Hull that “the greater part of Japanese commerce has been lost, Japanese industrial production has been drastically curtailed, and Japan’s national resources have been depleted.” Grew went on to warn of “an all-out, do-or-die attempt, actually risking national hara kiri, to make Japan impervious to economic embargoes abroad rather than to yield to foreign pressure”. . . .​

The culmination of U.S. economic warfare against Japan by late summer of 1941 confronted Tokyo with essentially two choices: seizure of Southeast Asia, or submission to the United States. Economic destitution and attendant military paralysis would soon become a reality if Japan did nothing. The embargo was already beginning to strangle Japanese industry, and Japan’s stockpiled oil amounted to no more than 18- 24 months of normal consumption—and substantially less should Japan mount major military operations in Southeast Asia. . . .​

Yet the price the Americans demanded for lifting the embargo and restoring U.S.-Japanese trade to some semblance of normality was no more acceptable: abandonment of empire. The Roosevelt administration demanded that Japan not only terminate its membership in the Tripartite Alliance, but also withdraw its military forces from both China and Indochina, and by extension, the Japanese feared, Manchuria (after all, the United States had refused to recognize the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo). Abandonment of China and Indochina would have compelled Japan to write off its hard-won gains on the Asian mainland since 1937 and drop any hope of becoming the dominant power in East Asia. For Japan, a major reason for establishing an empire in East Asia was to free itself of the very kind of humiliating economic dependency on the United States that the embargo represented. And what was to stop the Americans from coercing further territorial concessions from the Japanese, including withdrawal from Manchuria and even Korea and Formosa? Japan “could not accept any interim solution that left it dependent on American largesse” or any deal that left it in a position of “continued reliance on the whims of Washington. The possibility that the Americans might supply Japan with just enough oil, steel, and other materials to maintain a starveling existence was intolerable to any Japanese statesman”. . . .​

The United States was, in effect, demanding that Japan renounce its status as an aspiring great power and consign itself to permanent strategic dependency on a hostile Washington. Such a choice would have been unacceptable to any great power. Japan’s survival as a major industrial and military power was a stake— far more compelling reasons for war than the United States later advanced for its disastrous wars of choice in Vietnam and Iraq. Would the United States ever have permitted a hostile power to wreck its foreign commerce and strangle its domestic economy without a resort to war? (pp. 6-21, https://ssi.armywarcollege.edu/pdffiles/pub905.pdf)​

And this is not to mention FDR's military provocations: moving the Pacific Fleet to Pearl Harbor (which made training, strategic, or logistical sense), basing B-17 bombers in Philippines, and sending small ships on useless alleged "recon" missions within range of Japanese naval forces (the Japanese did not take the bait).

 

[Unkotare]

.....So tired of you leftist .......

"Leftist"? Who are YOU to call anyone a leftist while you suck the nuts of a long-dead leftist scumbag who himself sucked the nuts of one of the few worse leftist scumbags in power in the world at the time? You worship a villain who showed the same regard for American citizens and our Constitution that he did the lives of countless civilians around the world (including those in the US). Your choice of hero worship paints YOU as the "leftist."

 

[P@triot]

Let’s do a little thought experiment. W invades Iraq and caused possibly as many as one million deaths of mostly civilians (no doubt this makes you so proud). Let’s say Iraq manages to beat back the invasion and ultimately invades the US homeland. Since Americans elected W, you think the Iraqi armed forces are justified in mass murdering American civilians.

Do you see your foolish thinking?

Allow me to do an actual "thought experiment" (ask an adult for help here):

You neighbor comes over and asks to borrow your lawnmower. You say "no". You then believe your neighbor would be 100% justified in coming into your home in the middle of the night, while you slept, and brutally murdered your wife, your 5 year old daughter, and your 8 month old infant son.

Yes folks...that is literally the argument gipper and mikegriffith1 have made in this thread.

LOL. Now that is really dumb.

Apparently you don’t know how dumb. LOL.

Hahahahahaha! You have absolutely no response when someone uses your own words to illustrate just how dumb you've been in this thread.

 

[P@triot]

Yes you believe as the Nazis, Imperial Japanese, Soviets did. Kill innocent women and children ruthlessly and relentlessly. Kill them all.

Well they killed their own citizens. I don't believe in that. I do believe in defending myself by any and all means necessary. Only an idiot wouldn't.

 

[P@triot]

I don't think you are aware of everything FDR was doing to provoke Japan to war.

I will quote this paragraph again as the final paragraph in the following rather long extract from Dr. Record’s monograph:

It is the central conclusion of this monograph that the Japanese decision for war against the United States in 1941 was dictated by Japanese pride​

Oh, well hell, why didn't you say so?!? Pride is a damn good reason to drop bombs on unsuspecting people. And it's a damn good reason to believe they were justified and the United States was "evil" for not taking their bombing and asking for more.

 

[mikegriffith1]

I don't think you are aware of everything FDR was doing to provoke Japan to war.

I will quote this paragraph again as the final paragraph in the following rather long extract from Dr. Record’s monograph:

It is the central conclusion of this monograph that the Japanese decision for war against the United States in 1941 was dictated by Japanese pride​

Oh, well hell, why didn't you say so?!? Pride is a damn good reason to drop bombs on unsuspecting people.

Now you're just being dishonest. Let's read the part of Dr. Record's statement that you snipped, with the snipped part in italics

It is the central conclusion of this monograph thatthe Japanese decision for war against the United States in 1941 was dictated by Japanese pride and the threatened economic destruction of Japan by the United States.​

Yes, you'd better believe that defending yourself against economic destruction is a doggone good reason for a nation to go to war. Many nations throughout history have gone to war when another nation or nations were trying to bring about about their economic destruction.

I notice you again avoided the point that FDR severely provoked Japan, that he rejected all of Japan's peace offers, and that he wanted Japan to attack.

And it's a damn good reason to believe they were justified and the United States was "evil" for not taking their bombing and asking for more.

Yeah, this is more third-grade posturing. It's very odd to see you apply the label of "leftist" to people who criticize FDR's provocation of our long-time anti-Communist ally Japan, his treasonous supporting of the Soviet Union, his handing over tens of millions of people to Communist rule at Yalta, etc., etc. It is equally odd to see you cry "leftist" against people who object to Truman's nuking of an anti-Communist country that did not want to fight us in the first place, an anti-Communist country that tried to reach a peace deal with us, an anti-Communist country that Truman knew was willing to surrender if only he would modify the surrender terms to guarantee that the emperor would not be deposed.

Just to be clear: YOU are the one who is siding with Soviet mass-murderer Joseph Stalin, who did not want the U.S. to make peace with Japan in 1941 and who urged Truman not to modify the demand for unconditional surrender.

 

[mikegriffith1]

Admiral Ellis Zacharias’s book Secret Missions: The Story of an Intelligence Officer (Naval Institute Press, 1946) contains much valuable information about Japan’s peace efforts and surrender. In 1942, Zacharias began working in the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) and headed the Office of War Information, which conducted psyops operations and did Japanese-language broadcasts to Japan.

Admiral Zacharias wrote that in December 1944 or January 1945, ONI received an intelligence report through a neutral country that revealed that peace advocates in the Japanese government, including the emperor, were maneuvering to bring about Japan’s surrender. The document predicted with amazing accuracy the events that unfolded in the Japanese government, such as the resignation of General Koiso and the appointment of Admiral Suzuki to bring about an end to the war (pp. 335-341).

Admiral Zacharias, who had served as a naval attache in Japan before the war, was a genuine Japan expert and spoke fluent Japanese. He argued strongly that the peace faction in Japan’s government could bring about a surrender if Truman would modify the surrender terms to include an assurance that the emperor would not be deposed or molested (pp. 363-375).

 

[mikegriffith1]

A little-known fact—and it’s little-known because few books on WW II discuss it—is that the battle in the government over modifying unconditional surrender and nuking Japan was a battle between Republicans and conservative Democrats on the one hand vs. liberals/New Dealers on the other hand. Most Republicans and conservative Democrats in the government wanted to modify the surrender terms to assure the emperor would not be deposed and either opposed nuking Japan or argued that it should be done against a military target and only after an explicit warning was issued. It was mostly liberals/New Dealers who wanted to stick with unconditional surrender and who wanted to nuke Japanese cities with no warning.

Historians Waldo Heinrichs and Marc Gallicchio’s discuss this revealing fact in their book Implacable Foes: War in the Pacific, 1944-1945 (Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 629-631. Admiral Ellis Zacharias also discussed this fact in his book Secret Missions: The Story of an Intelligence Officer (Naval Institute Press, 1946), pp. 333-338, 383-394. In the months leading up to Hiroshima, one conservative journal complained that it was “’liberals and New Dealers’ who wanted to execute the emperor” and that the refusal to modify the surrender terms was needlessly prolonging the war (Implacable Foes, pp. 629-631). Liberals in the White House and in the War Department launched vicious attacks on Joseph Grew and on other Japan experts who correctly argued that the Japanese would never surrender if they believed we would depose the emperor, and that there was a strong possibility that the peace faction in Japan’s government could bring about a surrender if Truman would simply provide an assurance that the emperor would not be deposed (Secret Missions, 333-338, 383-395).

It's also worth noting that many of the early critics of Truman's nuking of Japan were conservatives (American Conservatives Are the Forgotten Critics of the Atomic Bombing of Japan | Barton J. Bernstein).

In later years, many liberals finally began to question the necessity and morality of Truman's nuking of Japan.

 

[mikegriffith1]

As I’ve mentioned, Admiral Ellis Zacharias’s book Secret Missions: The Story of an Intelligence Officer (U.S. Naval Institute Press, 1946) contains a large amount of valuable information about the events leading to Japan’s surrender. For example, Admiral Zacharias noted that numerous peace feelers were coming in to Washington by late May or early June, and that one of feelers via the Vatican had the approval of the emperor:

By then [late May, early June] peace feelers were coming in to Washington in amazingly large numbers. The most persistent of these came via the Vatican. . . .​

It was reported that the emperor himself was seeking mediation through the Pope through the Archbishop of Tokyo, who happened to be the brother of a former foreign minister, the late Yosuke Matsuoka. . . . The Vatican was informed openly that the Archbishop of Tokyo was acting upon the emperor’s behest and that his [the archbishop’s] role was merely that of an intermediary. . . .

These approaches began to reach the Vatican in April and continued throughout May. . . . (p. 364).​

Admiral Zacharias, like so many other scholars, lamented Truman’s failure to follow up on the peace opening that was provided when we learned that the Japanese were seeking Soviet mediation to clarify the surrender terms and to reach a peace deal, and the admiral noted that the holdup was the lack of certainty about the emperor’s fate in unconditional surrender. Admiral Zacharias argued that if the various statements on unconditional surrender, including the Potsdam Declaration, had been provided in June, the war would have ended without Soviet intervention and without the dropping of nukes:

Admiral Suzuki, the new premier, was particularly concerned over this question of Japanese sovereignty. He was very close to the emperor, having been grand chamberlain for many years. . . .​

He was more than willing to heed the emperor’s desire to bring about peace—but his loyalty to the emperor made him refrain from doing anything about it until he could ascertain what the Allies had in mind regarding the future of the fate of the imperial house. In his plight he decided upon what in retrospect appears to have been a desperate move. In June he instructed Mr. Sato, the Japanese ambassador to the Kremlin, to make representations to Marshal Stalin and ask him to intervene with the Western Allies on Japan’s behalf in order to obtain a further clarification of the unconditional surrender formula, and, if possible, peace terms. . . .​

It is left to the judgment of history to explain why it was necessary for the Soviet Union to take its course of action and why the Allies refused to exploit the opening provided by Japan herself. If the detailed interpretations of the unconditional surrender formula had been forthcoming in June rather than the end of July [when the Potsdam Declaration was issued], the war would have ended without Soviet participation and before the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Although the historical perspective is insufficient as yet to provide a complete picture as it existed in June 1945, it is an undeniable fact that the diplomatic situation provided an opportunity for peace many weeks before mid-August. . . . (pp. 367-368)​

 

[P@triot]

Yes, you'd better believe that defending yourself against economic destruction is a doggone good reason for a nation to go to war.

Yeeaahh...no it's not. At all. Only an asshole would say something like that. Only defending one's self against lethal force (including preemptive) is a reason for war.

The U.S. had absolutely not ability to create "economic destruction" for Japan. They had their own nation with their own resources. If they couldn't function on their own, that's their own incompetence.

Bottom line, you're an idiot. Typical left-wing, American-hating idiot.

 

[mikegriffith1]

Here is a sensible explanation of the alternatives that were available to Truman in August 1945, alternatives that did not involve killing over 200,000 civilians and seriously injuring thousands of others with two atomic bombs, presented by Dr. Alex Wellerstein, a professor at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Dr. Wellerstein holds a doctorate in the history of science from Harvard University. Dr. Wellerstein:

Many of those who defend the bombings seem to end up in a position of believing that 1. there were no other options on the table at the time except for exactly what did occur, and 2. that questioning whether there were other options does historical damage. As a historian, I find both of these positions absurd. First, history is full of contingency, and there were several explicit options (and a few implicit ones) on the table in 1945 — more than just “bomb” versus “invade”. . . .​

The Hiroshima mission was delayed until August 6th because of weather conditions in Japan. The Kokura mission (which became the Nagasaki mission) was originally scheduled for August 11th, but got pushed up to August 9th because it was feared that further bad weather was coming. At the very least, waiting more than three days after Hiroshima might have been humane. Three days was barely enough time for the Japanese high command to verify that the weapon used was a nuclear bomb, much less assess its impact and make strategic sense of it. Doing so may have avoided the need for the second bombing run altogether. Even if the Japanese had not surrendered, the option for using further bombs would not have gone away. . . .​

Two months before Hiroshima, scientists at the University of Chicago Metallurgical Laboratory, one of the key Manhattan Project facilities, authored a report arguing that the first use of an atomic bomb should not be on an inhabited city. The committee, chaired by Nobel laureate and German exile James Franck, argued that a warning, or demonstration, of the bomb on, say, a barren island, would be a worthwhile endeavor. If the Japanese still refused to surrender, then the further use of the weapon, and its further responsibility, could be considered by an informed world community. Another attractive possibility for a demonstration could be the center of Tokyo Bay, which would be visible from the Imperial Palace but have a minimum of casualties if made to detonate high in the air. Leo Szilard, a scientist who had helped launch the bomb effort, circulated a petition signed by dozens of Manhattan Project scientists arguing for such an approach. . . .​

By the summer of 1945, a substantial number of the Japanese high command, including the Emperor, were looking for a diplomatic way out of the war. Their problem was that the Allies had, with the Potsdam Declaration, continued to demand “unconditional surrender,” and emphasized the need to remove “obstacles” preventing the “democratic tendencies” of the Japanese people. What did this mean, for the postwar Japanese government? To many in the high command, this sounded a lot like getting rid of the Imperial system, and the Emperor, altogether, possibly prosecuting him as a “war criminal.” For the Japanese leaders, one could no more get rid of the Emperor system and still be “Japan” than one could get rid of the US Constitution and still be “the United States of America.” During the summer, those who constituted the “Peace Party” of the high council sent out feelers to the then still-neutral Soviet Union to serve as possible mediators with the United States, hopefully negotiating an end-of-war situation that would give some guarantees as to the Emperor’s position. (Were there alternatives to the atomic bombings?)​