The war plan for invading Japan, "Operation Downfall" would ahve cost millions of lives on both saides, due to the fact that the Japanesse soldiers fought to the death. Dropping th bomb on major cities may have been bad, but I think dropping the bomb in geneal was a good decision i norder to avert the invasion of Japan and the fighting that would have been involved there.

Something to point out that I've seen a lot recently - The fire-bombings of Tokyo and Dresden were much more casualty-heavy than the Nukes used.

I think the general strategy of massacring civilians is abominable though. IMO bombing civilian population centres should be a war-crime. That doesn't mean I'd expect a nation's leader to not choose a strategy that would leave less casualties on their side though either. I still want those responsible for issuing the orders to decimate cities held accountable.

This was a strategic political decision - not a military one.
Yes, invading Japan would have been crazy (estimated at 150,000 allied troops lost, half a million Japanese military, and quarter million civilian casualties). However, there were other options (having in mind Japan has no resources to produce arms or even feed itself).
However, using the nukes ensured:
- a less deadly cold war (e.g. a warning to the Soviets)
- the US population felt vindicated for Pearl Harbor
- no chance of the Soviets + China communists invading Japan (as they would have done - regardless of the costs)
No other alternative gives you this. Tough decision, but have not heard a better alternative yet.
Keep in mind two other things:
1. The Japanese leadership did not surrender after the first nuke. So, it is my belief they are the guily ones for Nagasaki
2. The US at least had the thinking to start from a relatively smaller town, and then move on to the bigger ones (as there were more cities planned). They went for the show - not for the headcount.

This is a margin call and I'm just glad I never had to make the decission. However, I feel that the bombings were wrong and it came on top of many other things that were wrong and these wrongs are continued to this day. The answer I think lies in how the victors relate to the vanquished today. The passage of time teaches us that the people of Japan and German were not our enermies, only their ruling classes were. If we were to have taken a policy of containment - then and now, the people's will will eventually triumph and rogue states turn themselves around. Using force may bring about change quicker but it also carries the risk of allienating people rather than bringing them together. All conflicts can be resolved with less bloodshed and more time. Time really can heal all ills.

But then, what do I know I'm mad.

Using nukes instead of going for other alternatives was - as pointed out already by others - a strategic/political decision, and not a military one. I personally think that it was immoral, unjust, and ultimately ineffective on the long run. Of the three main powers in the axis, only Germany went under an extensive de-nazification process. Italy and Japan did not and - contrarily - in each of these countries (for Japan my knowledge is second-handed, for Italy it is direct) the cultural root of fascism has not been eradicated at all, and surges of fascist tendencies are not uncommon.

While I agree with the opening statement of ivanov, I disagree from several of his points:

>> "a less deadly cold war (e.g. a warning to the Soviets)" I would rather argue it was much of the contrary: the fact that CCCP knew USA was ready to use the bomb no matter what, caused rather the cold war to get on a global scale and become much more pervasive in everyday life.

>> "the US population felt vindicated for Pearl Harbor". I don't know if laughing or crying at this. By the same metre, Japanese would be entitled to drop a nuke on Chicago and Denver, travellers should kill a couple of millions of Germans, Palestinians should wipe out Israelis (but only after having given them the time to wipe off the map what the travellers left of Germany and half of Russia). I of course forgot the native Americans that should be entitled to infect some hundred thousands families with deadly viruses, and Eritrean, that would rightly entitled to use poisonous gasses on Italy...

>> "The Japanese leadership did not surrender after the first nuke. So, it is my belief they are the guily ones for Nagasaki" - Interesting, does this apply also in the following case? "As USA did not surrender after the USS Cole bombing, USA is to be considered guilty for the twin towers attack".

>> "The US at least had the thinking to start from a relatively smaller town, and then move on to the bigger ones (as there were more cities planned). They went for the show - not for the headcount". This is simply wrong. The main reason for which Hiroshima and Nagasaki were chosen was that they were essentially "good experimental sites": USA wanted to achieve the maximum damage in an untouched location (so as to be able to accurately assess the effectiveness of their new "toys" after the blasts). There is plenty of material available on this.

@Mac - maybe you misunderstood me or I didn't explain properly:
1. Having a global Cold War, from my perspective, was the better alternative to having a 'regular' war :). Do you think a conventional war between the West and East would have been better for everyday life?

2. Yes, PR was a major factor. In the case of Germany the US did not need revenge, but in the case of Japan they did. I am not saying this as an accusation towards the US - I think it was a valid reason at the time.
Are you an American? Only Americans disagree with this :)

3. The example with USS Cole and 9/11 is simply irrelevant :)

4. Yes, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were good experimental sites. This is also what I am saying - they selected smaller targets. Maximum damage would have been Tokyo, Osaka, even Kobe (being the spiritual/religious center of Japan ~ something like Rome in Europe). You seem to know your history - so check which cities were in the initial target list and you'll see that they started from the bottom up in terms of damage/casualties.

I think we're in agreement on facts - but our interpretation is different :)

US used Nukes on Japan for the same reason any dog licks his balls.... Because they CAN :)

There was a simple justification for it: Fewer people were killed by the bombs than would have been by an invasion of Japan. The fact that there are alot of other issues doesn't get away from the fact that the Americans acted in order to defend the lives of their soldiers. The batch of purple hearts made for an invasion of Japan are still being handed out today, in spite of Korea, Vietnam, two gulf conflicts, war in Afghanistan.........

That is my opinion as well, they prevented far more casualties than would have happened had there been a true invasion of Japan. However there is the argument that there were a large number of civilian casualties that would have been smaller if there had not been the bombings, but I think that the number would have been just as high if there had been an invasion.

In any case I'm not here to defend my opinion, but it is very true that the Japanese army were strict followers of Shinto, and would fight to the death to defend their samurai code, not to mention they truly believed their emperor to be a religious deity, and therefore would have fought to the last man to defend their leader.

If the Emperor died in the invasion, Japan would never have been pacified. Also, an invasion would have involved the Soviets, possible making a North or East Japan, and the Republic of China would have gotten an occupation zone, which would have complicated the Taiwan issue even more, if World War III didn't break out between the much more influential Russia and the Allies.

So ultimately it was a good thing.

For the sake of Japan's civilians, the bombing was a good thing. From a moral standpoint, the massacre of "enemy civilians" is obviously a horrible act, but an invasion of Japan would have produced countless more civilian casualties.
Keep in mind that as the American military approached Japan, the Japanese military grew ever more ferocious. Most importantly, the Japanese army forced civilians to commit suicide after losing at Okinawa, while at the Battle of Saipan many civilians jumped off the cliffs rather than surrender to the Americans.
So an invasion would ultimately have led to the deaths of countless civilians alongside the aforementioned American deaths.

Samurai code? well the top 1% of the Japanese were samurai but the vast bulk were peasants drafted into the army with no choice. Japan was basically a feudal medieval state with guns at the time.
there were options- a siege of the islands that has very little metals, no oil and relies on its fishing fleet for a large portion of its food source was one of them. i think it was rejected due to America wanting to end things quickly and redirect its forces to face a possible Russian and Chinese threat. Im not sure were you get the idea that if the emperor had dies japan would have been impossible to pacify. feudal populations are pretty used to following orders. the Us was seriously considering hanging the emperor after the war but decided not to in order to quickly stabilize japan and make her an ally against the Russians.
so yes its true there were all these good strategic reasons for the bombing but was it the moral thing to do?

Yes, because less people dies and the war ended quicker. Just about anything that ends wars quickly with fewer deaths is moral.

Also remember people didn't have any idea what the atom bomb really represented. To most of the people in charge it was just a big bomb that could do a lot of damage. They couldn't be used today, obviously.

I like this arguement that says bombing Japan meant that probably less people died. Lets assume it is true. Is it now right to kill one person if we know for sure that that one person would kill two people? Let's upscale a bit. IF (big If lets not argue about the IF) If we knew that population growth will ultimately lead to global warming and that will distroy our planet - is it then everybodies moral duty to go around shooting people because that way less people will die?

What do I know I'm Mad!

strongly against their use.
the japanese were already ready to surrender due to extensive firebombing of their completely wooden cities.
it was unnecessary

and how is killing millions of people justified by not wanting to kill people

@ivanov.

Ok for point 1, yes we misunderstood each other on what you originally meant.

2. I am European, yet it is the first time I hear that a "wish of retaliation" was one of the factors used for deciding whether to bomb Japan or not... could you point me to your sources? I would like to learn more about this. I still think that "military decisions" turn into "bad military decisions" when they are taken on an emotional basis though... yet, if this is what have been done for real...

3. Why should it be irrelevant the example with the USS Cole and the WTC? It is the same logic of not bending to the terrorists. Additionally, Japan was on the verge of capitulation already prior to the first bombing. It was just a matter of time and it would have surrendered anyhow.

4. The original list of proposed targets was Kyoto > Hiroshima > Yokohama > Kokura Arsenal. These cities were selected on the basis of their radius, presence of hills/mountains in the surrounding (increasing the damage of the bomb) and the fact that they were more or less "not damaged" by previous incursions and thus allowing to better monitor the direct effects of the bomb. The first candidate target was famously ruled out by the USA secretary of war, because he knew the city from his honeymoon and loved it. The choice therefore fell on Hiroshima. The choice of Nagasaki came after the first blast, and was a kind of "second experiment", wanting to test the bomb in a site with different geographical features. So yes... I keep the version that USA did not choose targets on a "limiting the dead toll" basis, but on the basis of "the best site for my new toy".

To all those who put in terms of alternative choice the invasion (the Downfall plan) or the nuke bombing: while the plan for the invasion had been designed, there is no evidence that it would have been concretely implemented. Japan was already on his knees at the time of the bombing (The Russians were doing great in Manchuria) and there were a number of reports (intelligence and survey amongst POV's) that Japan would have surrendered anyhow in a short while.

In my eyes, there are some similarities between that decision and what happened more recently with Rumsfield and the top military people over the wisdom of leading the Iraq invasion the way it has been (it is well known the military people hated the arrogance and short-sighting of Rumsfield). At the time of the bombings most of the military key figures deemed the nuke bombing as "unnecessary"... and I am not talking about some unknown minor officer, but of Eisenhower, MacArthur, Nimitz... but the political decision makers went for it anyhow...

@ Sicarius: although I share your opinion against the use of the bombs, I have to rectify the data you gave: in Hiroshima + Nagasaki, even considering the death due to radiation poisoning in the following decades, the number of dead people hardly touched the 500.000 units (most estimates are around 300.000).

Not that this change much in the "logic", but I think it is important to keep the sense of proportions (for example in noticing that the Chernobyl accident has roughly the same death toll, or that the Genocide in Rwanda - done with machetes - had more than twice that number of victims).

The Soviets invaded after the first bombing and the day of the second. While their invasion wasn't irrelevant, attacks on Japan itself would obviously be of greater urgency to the Japanese government.

It was the right decision and arguments against it are based mostly on a revisionist look at history where America is the perpetual villain.

all hail mighty america the country that can do no wrong

Well, it isn't the country that can do no right, which is the feeling I'm starting to get here.

well to be fair it is a bit deserved really

I find that Utilitarianism can be bended to whichever side one wishes to argue...

Not to mention the false dichotomy of either dropping the bomb or going through with Operation Downfall. It may be that Operation Downfall was the most likely alternative but that doesn't make it the basis on which to judge the morality of dropping the bomb. The fact is that there are many different courses of action that were available but were likely dismissed because of the Allied political agenda.

It's ridiculous to debate the hypothetical and hope to get some sort of conclusion, but I suppose it might be interesting. I would say the use of nuclear weapons was immoral, but I don't consider nuclear weapons to be more immoral than any sort of weapon that would achieve the same effect. There is no grand chalk line of morality that nuclear weapons naturally crosses on it's own. It was immoral because it killed a lot of citizens and destroyed a city and rendered it uninhabitable.

@ Mac, who wrote: "Additionally, Japan was on the verge of capitulation already prior to the first bombing. It was just a matter of time and it would have surrendered anyhow." In fact, there is much proof - and much more in recent years as archives have been studied and unearthed - that the Japanese were anything BUT ready to surrender - a fact clear to Allied intelligence at the time. Yes, Japan was willing to negotiate - and the terms they wanted in cabinet discussions would basically have rewarded their aggression and kept the militarists in power to fight another day. It wasn't just a matter of Emperor or no Emperor.

Note that even after the *second* bomb, the Japanese war cabinet was still *tied* on the issue of surrender - hardly a sign that they were about to roll over. Recent books - Richard Frank's "Downfall" is the best of them - have brilliantly catalogued how improvised Japanese industries were actually recovering strength in terms of aircraft construction and basic land armaments in the pre-Hiroshima period.

I'm a little biased; my grandfather was in active service in Burma after almost four years of fighting the Japanese when the bombs dropped. So I tend to think of the decision in different terms, and there is much literature to support the idea that US officials had the same issues in mind: millions of real people were still under Japanese occupation, and hundreds of thousands of allied prisoners were still starving in camps across the Pacific and Western Asia, in addition to tens of thousands of soldiers still fighting and dying real battles against soldiers who weren't rushing to surrender as claimed. I think the bombings were a 'cruel' decision, but to have waited patiently for the aggressor to give up also meant gambling patiently with the lives of literally millions of Allied soldiers and civilians - not to mention Japanese as well.

I think its neccessary to point out that the western powers had no real clue that the CCP would be able to take power in China. Even after the war the KMT outnumbered the Communists 3-1, I'm guessing that the Chinese Communist threat was not on their mind (They didn't take power for almost five years). The Russian threat on the other hand definitely was though. Especially in the minds of influential leaders like Churchill and the ambassador that wrote 'The Long Telegram'.

Also, if I'm not mistaken the Japanese only surrendered three days after the Russians declared war on them. I'm somehow guessing the prospect of fighting a war they were already losing on another front was simply too much to contemplate. I find it hard to believe this wasn't on their minds as well. I'm also guessing that they also didn't want the Russians (Who had in the past been humiliated by the Japanese navy) to have a say in surrender talks - which would probably have ended up much worse for the Japanese people.

@Invictus. The thing - I believe - is not about choosing between "USA can do no evil" and "USA can do no right", but about having a less ideological and more historiographical view to the events of the past.

I have the impression that this - for the average USA citizen - roughly translates with "coming out of the fairy tale in which USA are good and generous and face the not-always-nice-looking reality".

The US mainstream opinion about itself and its role (both present role and the one had during the WWII) has been affected for decades by ideology, and ideologies - as we know - are dangerous, deforming lenses through which observer the reality.

There are several elements that contributed to building and reinforcing the ideology of the USA. I never studied the issue, but off the top of my head:

1. A partial understanding (with overestimation) of the role of USA in the WWII in Europe: USA public opinion seem to acknowledge very little the role of European resistance and to totally forget the role of Russia and China. For example, USA counted less than 500.000 deaths in the conflict. Both CCCP and China are well beyond 20 million each. This is not of course to say that the importance of USA intervention was not paramount in ending the war and in shaping contemporary Europe. But USA public opinion tends to forget that they have been successful only because Russia, China, UK, etc... had fought for an extent and in conditions that USA troops never experienced. In other words: in a lot of USA media I read stories about the WWII in which it seems that it was the USA to come and free Europe from Nazis and Fascists on its own.

2. An ideological bias onto the so called "communism/socialism": USA public opinion had and still has (even though to a lesser extent) a very shallow understanding of what the socialist economical and political theories are. "Socialism" is used in many of the threads on this very forum as a pejorative word, for example, when not totally out-of context (in a recent thread someody said that Barak Obama is a socialist, just to give an example...). McCarthyism is probably the apotheosis of such medieval attitude towards diversity of views (in Europe we had our fair share with the crusades and the inquisition, btw). While USA public opinion was chasing witches, in Europe - even in those countries that have been always and tightly in the western geopolitical hemisphere - socialism was playing an important role in shaping the public opinion, and the communist parties in various European countries massively contributed to create welfare and social systems that are far better than USA ones (think to health care and education, for example). Again: this is not to say that CCCP was an equally good system than the western democracies, but it is to say that USA public opinion - having an ideological preclusion towards socialism - did not develop analytical tools precise enough to really understand the world and above all the world' reactions to USA global approach. [So that 9/11 got USA people by surprise, or that they got astonished Iraqi population did not welcome USA troops as saviours in Baghdad, etc...]

3. The neocon rhetoric about the "special mission of USA" in the world, with particular emphasis on the "world police" role. This is something that really disconnected USA from the rest of the planet as this role is a purely self-generated illusion by the USA ruling class. Of course - with the fall of CCCP - USA had basically no limits to exercise unilaterally their military and economic power, but this does not mean that people of the planet saw this flexing of muscles as "the police coming to rescue us", hence the recent surge of anti-USA public discourse world-wide.

There are probably many more elements, and somebody who spent time researching on this could probably articulate the previous points to a much deeper level... my point is simply to say that I am not astonished at this point in time many USA people are surprised by the rest of the world being critical of the past 60 years of USA politics... The fact is that that criticism has always been there, but USA public opinion refused to see it for what it was, and labelled it as "propaganda", "misinformation", "socialist lies" and alike.

Finally, I would like to stress that each country has its own "cradle of ideology" according to which that country is the best ever because X, Y and Z... USA simply happens to be the country - at this moment in history - with the most power, and therefore it is normal that the spotlight of public discourse is often on it.

USA has a lot of "right" things in it. Just to mention one: the last presidential election process has been a master class in applied democracy to the world, for example.

But until USA public opinion will not at least try to abandon the lenses of ideology to watch to USA, people from that country will be doomed to have a lot of unpleasant surprises when talking with people from the rest of the world.

very well said and explained mac

yes, well said mac.

i would add that it is not only neocons who promote the idea of American timeless uniqueness and irreplaceableness (id that a word?).

9/11 and US elite opinion that to question US policy in the middle east/Israel is a taboo topic in the mainstream media and is questioning it is akin to supporting the terrorists is another example of such inwardness.

Unable to question why such a foul act of terrorism was committed upon them they were led up the garden path by such nonsense as "they hate our freedom"

This is a great clip from an old British comedy "Yes, Prime Minister" about upgrading the nuclear deterrent from the polaris system.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IX_d_vMKswE&feature=related

Here's a diplomacy related one I found while searching for it which is also funny.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZUOkGxGUVs&feature=related

i do love yes prime minister

irreplaceability?

@ mac, yes it's very prevelant here from a few people. I love being called a communist or a socialist (both of which I despise) because I dont agree with some facet of modern american government

Very well put mac.