![]() Proponents, including former President Harry Truman (who never recanted his decision to drop the bombs), maintain that it was a necessary measure to prevent a costly invasion of Japan, with casualties expected to rise into the millions. The ethical justifications of nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain in considerable debate. 2 The perspective of thinking about this event in post-war Japan.With the end of the war and the transition to a Cold War a great many justifications and motivations for dropping the bomb were created and transmorgified over the decades, few of these seem to have been in active play when making the actual decision in the month before. Rudimentary bureaucracy theories might suggest that the primary driving force was to demostrate vast amounts of money hadn't been pissed up against a wall. ![]() Here's a better than half decent resource to get tarted that points at most of the majr sources and opinions on the matter:īear in mind that Truman was a late in the day President with no prior knowledge of the Manhatten Project until after he was read in and that many of the driving forces in the later stages came from justifying the single most expensive military R&D project undertaken to date in the face of a German threat that no longer existed. > the purpose of dropping the bombs was to display the capability to the USSRĬan you support that with a quote from before the bombing of H&N from the senior staff responsible for testing the weapons? with very similar levels of death and follow on disease. That aside, the bald unpleasant fact of the time is simple had H&N not been atom bombed they would have been firebombed. the window for live field testing was rapidly closing given the approach of Russians from the north and relative lack of untouched targets. The neccessity to use bombs developed to counter possible German atomic weapons on a rapidly dwindling Japan now that Germany had been defeated was a kind of military necessity. The argument is whether a policy of total warfare | destruction was neccesary, the carpet bombing of cities to date was much more cost effective (at that point in the war) than the use of limited extremely expensive atomic weapons. ![]() H&N were picked off that list as they were essentially untouched at that point and were "clean ground" to test the field use of two different bomb designs after the "lab test" at Trinity. Prior to the atomic bombs being dropped the US had already carpet bombed 72 other cities, including Tokyo, and they had a list of future targets to destroy. What many seem to have forgotten is that H&N were cities already on a kill list. The nuclear bombs are entirely orthogobal to the bombing of H & N. Samuel Walker calls "the consensus view", basically says that the bombs were seen as a perfectly fine, if not a little unusual, military decision, that they might not have been solely responsible for the surrender of Japan, and that the use of the bombs in the way they were used (on cities, little spacing, early August) was a mixture of vaguely strategic thinking (no "grand plan" on anyone's part, but people did have some ideas about what you might get out of doing it that way) and complete happenstance (the spacing between the bombs, and the fact that they had two ready to go in early August, depended on external factors that had nothing to do with real strategy). (There are a few who stake out the other end, too.) The "middle" position, what the historian J. The authors you are quoting, like Zinn (and Kuznik, who is also quoted by another response), are I think pretty anomalous in that they still stake out a hard, confident position on one end of the spectrum. "terrible war crime done just to look tough"). The way I see the field these days is a lot of hovering around a "middle" position on the bombs, as opposed to the extreme "ends" of the spectrum ("totally justified, best decision ever" vs. ![]() Alex Wellerstein has a lot of great writing on this subject on his blog and on the /r/askhistorians subreddit under the username 'restricteddata'. ![]()
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