Will terrorism be the future of warfare?

[DrClapeyron]

The question is: why did one need to stop it in 2 weeks now ? It had been going on for a few years up to that point!

Best answer right there. A quick end was presented to a long war.

winning before Stalin got the opportunity to get in. I had the impression that that was Truman's most important argument.

And why would you say that is?

 

[Stingray]

I think the 6 months claim is highly debatable. Given: No surrender after the 1st bomb. No surrender after the 2nd bomb until conventional bombing was actually restarted.

There was very little time between the two bombs. The Imperial Court (or whatever it was called) was actually in session discussing surrender when someone rushed into tell them that Nagasaki had just been destroyed. The bombs weren't the only things they were worried about, either. The Soviet army was massing for an invasion at that point, and had already captured Japanese territory in Manchuria.

Also, outright offerings of peace had been made multiple times by the Japanese government before this time. The channels used were unusual and somewhat unofficial, but the offers were there. The only stipulation was always that the emperor would remain in power. That was a sticking point we didn't want to give them despite allowing it in the end. In any case, Japan was militarily powerless by the end of the war. Their naval and air capabilities had been almost completely destroyed. They had no offensive capability left.

So the case for the atomic bombs was not as clear-cut as most people seem to think. Still, there is a lot of truth to the standard story. The Japanese government at the time could not be thought of as one entity. There was a significant group that never wanted to give up. They tried to stage a rebellion when the emperor announced that it was over. Luckily, that failed.

 

[mheslep]

Agreed except for:

I think that it shortened indeed drastically the war, and that in the overall balance, especially on the allied side, it diminished strongly the number of casualties.

I think it more likely that, especially on the Japanese side, it diminished the number casualties. Its ghoulish math but the Japanese dead vs US dead on Okinawa, etc bear this out.

 

[mheslep]

...The only stipulation was always that the emperor would remain in power. That was a sticking point we didn't want to give them despite allowing it in the end...

Not quite. Power is the right word regards what they wanted for the emperor and they didn't get it. The surrender insured the the emperor had zero power; he was only allowed to remain as figure head and avoided the hangman's noose.

 

[Stingray]

Not quite. Power is the right word regards what they wanted for the emperor and they didn't get it. The surrender insured the the emperor had zero power; he was only allowed to remain as figure head and avoided the hangman's noose.

I partially agree, but the emperor was mostly a figurehead before the war ended too. He was essentially forbidden by custom to give any direct orders, and very rarely said anything at all in an official setting. Japanese etiquette is a very strange thing to me, but that's the gist I've gotten from reading about it. Anyway, the one thing that did change after the war was that the people were told he was not a god.

 

[W3pcq]

No doubt dropping the bomb on large cities full of civilians was an act of pure evil. They could have dropped a warning bomb somewhere near, then one bomb on a city if that didn't work.

I think that the idea was not just to end the war, but to make an extra bold statement to the entire world. The message was that we now had the power to do this, and nbot afraid to do so, so don't f with us. The more damage and horror of the stronger the statement.

 

[TVP45]

There are good arguments about why the bomb should not have been used, but there are a couple reasons why it was almost unavoidable.

The investment of money, manpower, and resources in the Manhattan Project was so huge that it might not have been politically possible to simply "turn it off".

Truman simply did not understand the enormity of an atomic explosion. He was relatively uneducated and had no scientific training at all. His military experience was WWI.

There is no reason to believe the Japanese Army was ready to surrender or even to stand down. The vast majority of troops had not been engaged by Allied forces. Getting top military brass to go out somewhere to watch a demonstration would have been difficult.

The Kamikaze attacks made support of an invasion problematic.

There was only one proven bomb and one unproven bomb. Production of another bomb would have taken months, had the original been used for a demo.

I quite agree that the use of the atomic bombs was unbelievably horrible. As were the terror bombings of Dresden and Tokyo. Yet, I remain skeptical that there was any real alternative.

 

[TheStatutoryApe]

I think that terrorism is the future of warfare because then there is no place to counter attack. When all countries have nukes, then terrorism will be a way of war for all nations including superpowers.

It's already been done. Technology and Intel have gotten to the point that such things are extremely hard to hide anymore, and I doubt that there was much question about who was behind these things in the past either.

On a side note, you might like a book called 'The Cool War' Frederik Pohl.

winning before Stalin got the opportunity to get in. I had the impression that that was Truman's most important argument.

And why would you say that is?

Possibly because the Cold War had more or less already started. The Russians had already been caught spying on us, including nuke research facilities.