Did the US have to drop the A-bombs on Japan?

Pkruse

Turbo: modern ballistic missle re-entry bodies contain a very small charge. The depend on a direct hit to be effective. They are also much cleaner than they used to be with far less radioactive fallout. If you were hiding under that desk, you may very well survive the initial blast.

russ_watters

iii) risks a Japanese attack on the test.

turbo

When I entered elementary school, it was in the 1950s. Nobody knew where atomic bomb research was heading, but we were told to be "very afraid", amped up greatly after Sputnik. And no, I would not have survived the initial blast, since the fattest target around was a large hydro-dam with a 15-mile long empoundment upstream. Our little town and probably half of the towns downstream would have been wiped clean by the resultant flood.

mheslep

Thought of that but dropped it as unsupportable since I assumed high altitude US bombers like the B29 were pretty much immune to Japanese counter attack at that stage of the war? Dunno.

Antiphon

This thread is a Rorschach test of political and historical naiveté.

The atomic bombing of Japan at that time was necessary and right. The rectitude of any potential future atomic bombing of a future foe will have to be evaluated then and not on the pious moralizing of today's youth and leftists.

Drakkith

Modern ICBM's have yields around the 100-300 kt range depending on the warhead. This puts a "kill zone" of around 2-5 miles in diameter, with a much larger "probable kill zone" beyond that. It is highly unlikely Turbo would have survived a nuclear attack 1/10th of a mile away.

Maybe. It is always easy to look back and judge past events when the outcome is known. It is far harder to make the decision prior to the event without knowing any of the possible outcomes. That's the problem with trying to judge whether the bombings were "right" or "wrong". First, right and wrong are, in my opinion, too black and white. The use or non-use of nuclear weapons on Japan would/did have far reaching consequences that could not have been accurately predicted prior to dropping them. It is possible that the bombings were unnecessary, but unfortunately we CANNOT know what the outcome would have been had we not dropped them, because we did not choose that route. Attempting to judge Truman based on today's history is doomed to failure.

russ_watters

Oh, I wasn't thinking along those lines. I was thinking a tower for the bomb and a bunker for observation. Better reliability for the bomb. But yeah, I suppose they could have air-dropped it to prove it could be air dropped.

russ_watters

Still, the knowns about this are pretty compelling:

1. We know that the atom bomb dropping produced exactly the result Truman hoped it would (near immediate, unconditional surrender).
2. We know that it ended the war the fastest way possible at the time because there were no serious peace negotiations going on at the time. Therefore we know it saved American lives.
3. We do know that except for the people killed in the bombings, the result of the end of the war for the Japanese at the time and for the following generations of Japanese is extrordinarily positive.

The issue is that it is the alternatives that are speculative:
1. We don't know if it saved Japanese lives, but then, saving Japanese lives wasn't Truman's mandate. The answer could be anywhere from a net loss of tens of thousands of lives to a net savings of millions.
2. We don't know how many American lives it saved. As little as tens of thousands, as many as hundreds of thousands. Still, tens of thousands should be enough.
3. We don't know if a negotiated conditional surrender was possible and even if it was, we don't know what the conditions would have been and we don't know what life for the Japanese nor geopolitics would have been like afterwards. Still, it is tough to fathom it could have been any better than the reality. Most of the speculation, then, is necessarily pretty negative versus the reality.

This issue breeds revisionism and crackpottery precisely because the alternative possibilities are all so speculative and most are pretty negative. People lose sight of just how compelling the "knowns" are, and speculation doesn't require facts so people can make just about whatever unlikely speculation they wish.

Drakkith

Agreed Russ.

Dickfore

Guernica, Spain

phinds

ONE would have been enough as far as I'm concerned. THEY started the war and my dad was one of the men who would have fought in invading the mainland.

Drakkith

While technically true, remember the U.S. had been supporting Great Britain and the allies for years prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor. It isn't like we were simply sitting back in our recliners with a beer doing nothing.

SW VandeCarr

Britain was not at war with Japan on Dec 7, 1941.

Dickfore

And, thank God for that.

Drakkith

Irrelevant, Japan was already planning to take territory in the pacific from the British Empire, the French, and the U.S. in order to ensure an adequate supply of raw materials and trade goods. The invasion of China and parts of Russia and other areas happened because of this. The British and French had major holdings in the pacific, and the U.S. support of these nations and our own spreading influence was reason enough for them to attack us.

SW VandeCarr

You're simply confirming that Japan was planning to launch a war of aggression in the Pacific and East Asia. Part of that war involved attacks on the US, as well as British and Dutch possessions. Up to 12/07/1941 Japan was only involved in the war in China. Japan occupied French Indochina earlier in 1941, which severely damaged relations with the US. Japanese diplomats were in Washington discussing these issues when the attacks began.

Japan never attacked the USSR. The USSR declared war on Japan after the first atomic bomb was dropped in 1945 and immediately invaded Japanese occupied Manchuria.

You seem to saying Japan had some right to start the Pacific War because the US government was sympathetic to Britain and France but remained officially neutral. France, of course had already been defeated and its overseas possessions were nominally under Vichy control.

BWV

not quite true - Japan invaded soviet territory in 1939 and their experience in getting crushed by Zhukov swayed their decision to launch into the pacific in 1941