According to this Associated Press story (via Yahoo):
Most Americans surveyed in a poll say they do not think any country, including the United States, should have nuclear weapons.
During the Cold War, I would have disagreed strongly with such a sentiment. Without the threat of mutually assured destruction it would have been much more likely that the United States and the Soviet Union would have fought World War Three with advanced conventional arms. Given that WWII killed some 100 million people, a hot war between the two superpowers would have been devastating, not to mention that there is no guarantee that the West would have won.
However, that is not what really caught my attention and what I want to ask all of you about.
Six in 10 people age 65 and older approve of the use of the atomic bomb at the end of World War II; the same percentage of respondents 18 to 29 disapprove.
The argument for the use of Fat Man and Little Boy on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on August 6 and 9, 1945, is that this was the fastest means of ending the war without the potentially catastrophic losses Americans would have incurred by actually invading the Japanese home islands.
Potentially hundreds of thousands of American military casualties averted by the actual deaths of hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians.
Remember, atomic bombs were so new that the radiation and fallout effects were not really understood at the time. As much as a decade later the US was testing battlefield nuclear weapons with troops in the testing area.
The argument against strategic bombing, which, if viewed dispassionately, is overwhelming, had been lost long before, in the Blitz against London and the firebombings of Dresden and Coventry. The enemy was so evil and such a threat that perhaps this was justifiable.
In any case, I was wondering how Boomers feel about the first and so far only use of nuclear weapons in anger, some sixty years later.
by showing the world the true horror of these weapons contributed to the taboo against against their use. On the other hand…
how I feel about that except to say it’s always made me sad that it came to the use of the bombs. I’m sure, however, that the mothers and fathers of the day were relieved when all the killing stopped.
Today, and in the future, I can see no justification for use of nuclear weaponry.
with your last sentence completely.
Thanks for this thoughtful entry on a problem I’ve often pondered.
While I don’t have the sources at hand, it has been shown to a high degree of certainty that the Japanese had been trying to surrender prior to the atomic bombings, but were turned down by the Truman administration.
The exchange went something like this:
Japanese: – We would like to surrender please, on the condition that you will let us retain our Monarchy, since we believe the Emperor is indispensable to the existence of the Japanese nation.
Americans: – No, unconditional surrender. Or way or the high way.
Japanese: – Very well then; do your worst.
Americans:
Japanese: – We now wish to surrender unconditionally.
Americans: – What took you so long? By the way, you can keep that Emperor to whom you’re so attached.
Ignoble stuff, I daresay. The war was won already and there was no valid reason to turn down the Japanese proposal. But even if there were, why couldn’t Truman agree to a demonstration bombing on a desolate island, as many nuclear scientists, including Einstein, were urging? The Japanese had no way of knowing how many bombs the Americans had at hand. And failing that, it is not even true that an invasion would have been more costly in terms of lives than the nuking of two cities.
In reality of course, the nukings were for the benefit of Stalin more than for the Japanese. But this can not be admitted to the American public even 50 years hence, so instead one trots out the old lie about how costly an invasion would have been.
P.S. By coincidence, I just posted a brief eulogy of Hans Bethe on another thread. He was central in the Manhattan Project but later became a champion of arms control.
I was itching to post on this thread, but you posted everything I was going to say. I believe we always need to have nukes (because if we tried for a nuclear free world, some madman would get them and make himself emperor of the world); but to actually use them in a first strike is not excusable.
And it sucks that it was Truman who did it, because I like the guy in most other respects.
Alan
Maverick Leftist
My memory and understanding of the same even (we all hear about these kinds of things through huge filters) was that the Emperor was unwilling and unable to admit that he had made a mistake in going to war. Most likely there was a grievous cultural misunderstanding. The Americans wasted Japan to cry “uncle” and the Japanese wanted to save face. So Truman felt that he had to make Japan cry “uncle”.
PS Athenian sent me over here after I posted on the Kos:
“I can empathise with the difficulty of Truman’s decision, but I think that we were morally obliged to issue a warning shot. Of course our history tells of a Japan which truly refused to surrender.”
As Herbert Bix illustrates in his biography, “Emperor Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan”, the Showa Emperor was key to the Japanese prosecution of the war, as he was the only interface point and mediator between the army, the navy, and civilian factions. Not to mention the fact that he was the living symbol of 20 years of armed aggression, and of a state guilty of widespread atrocities.
Also, again as Bix describes, the terms of unconditional surrender were clarified somewhat in the Potsdam declaration of 26 July 45 to state that Japanese soldiers would be repatriated after surrender and disarmament, and that Japan would be able to retain peaceful industries and acquire raw materials freely on the open market. Japan refused these terms.
So no, I do not feel the “unconditional surrender” demand was inappropriate, neither in the context of the times nor in retrospect.
That said, I am ambivalent about whether dropping the bomb was right; strictly from the strategic bombing standpoint, it was not optimally effective. OTOH my dad – in the navy at the time – figures it might have saved his life.
Funny that this has come up as I just read yesterday that Dwight Eisenhower was against nuking Japan. He said there was no point to it as the War was already won and killing so many innocent civilians was wrong.
Yeah and they also oppose the government interfering with nuclear family decisions.
isn’t that nu-ku-lar? hell I can’t even mispronounce it right.
and already we have more people voting yes.
I was in a discussion at DKos when the other person
a prominent writer, said he favoured the dropping of the A-bombs. I was thunderstruck.
How can there be a rationale for that?
Saved American lives? Japan had made motions to surrender;
they wanted to negotiate ‘unconditional.’ They wanted to save the life of the emporer but they were beaten.
Anyway, I’m a diehard on this issue.
After what happened here on 9/11(and that only a tiny,tiny fraction of dropping bombs in Japan) with so many people appalled that innocent people were targeted and killed I would have thought that any targeting of civilians would be deemed unacceptable. Or is it only acceptable if we do it?–that overwhelming yes vote really bothers me.
been said about the first part. Did we expect poll numbers like these? Can we use them?
I mean the headline: AMERICANS DO NOT WANT U.S. TO HAVE NUCLEAR WEAPONS is kind of powerful, no? I may have been wrong to focus on the historical question.
Any thoughts?
The argument you quote is fake. It was concocted some time after the bombs were dropped. It’s fabricated.
I’m guessing more people over 65 and more people on this board are either aware of that or otherwise know the statement is false, and this explains the large “No” vote.
I doubt this. I think it just meant the war was going to be nuclear if it had come. The cold war was more or less a fake too — a pretext for the US to invade bully and terrorise third world countries for 40 years.
As evidence of this view consider how close to nuclear war the US pushed events during the Cuban missile crisis. Released documents say that Kennedy was informed by the CIA that in their view there was a great risk of nuclear war if he proceeded. Under your hypothesis of a fear of nuclear war this should have made Kennedy back down. In fact it might have made him escalate. He appears to have rejected a very reasonable offer of resolving the crisis peacefully (US to withdraw their nuclear weapons from Turkey in exchange for the USSR withdrawing from Cuba) in favour of escalation. Later we found out that a single Russian officer on a nuclear sub made the decision that could have blown the planet apart.
Several other incidents nearly precipitated nuclear war, mostly a result of faulty early warning systems. Another incident occurs about every 7 years or so. That doesn’t make me feel safe.
was it right to firebomb every japanese city other than nagasaki and hiroshima? does anyone care about those women and children burnt alive, or left to starve lying naked and helpless in the ashen rubble left after the bombings?
war is utterly immoral, and while the nukes were especially abhorrent, it is a grave mistake to lose sight of the senseless murder and devastation that we casually justify after the fact, blinded by the glare of those bombs.
in the beginning of the war we were rightly horrified by the japanese practice of aerial bombardment and strafing of chinese civilian populations (in addition to all manner of atrocity). “total war” was rightly treated as a war crime in itself. by the end we had become what we claimed to be fighting against, and in so doing gave birth to a new generation of curtis lemays, whose victims are strewn across the second half of the 20th century (and, it appears, will continue their handicraft well into the 21st). no amount of justifications or “they started it”s will undo the terror that we participated in during that war, or the maignant inertia that it left us with afterwards, hurtling ever into the darkness.
Sadly, one reason people don’t talk about this more, is that it could be twisted to make nuclear weapons moreacceptable–and you can just see Rumsfeld making the argument:
After all, if Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren’t really that much worse than Dresden, and the other Japanese cities you refer to, then why do we, today, insist on a special ban against nuclear weapons?
As I sad, sadly, this really is a concern that many people have.
you’re probably right. i tend to lump them together in a generally pacifist sense, but i understand the pragmatism on holding the line where we can. all the same, it doesn’t mean that getting burnt to death with conventional weapons was peachy, tho, or that those deaths are not worth solemnly remembering as a war crime.
— Public statement by President Truman, 8/9/45
So, if it could be defended on its own, why the need to lie?
Not to mention:
So, we didn’t need the Bomb to win the war, after all. We needed it to cut off the Soviets…and send them a little message about what we could do to them, as well.
More on Truman and the Bomb, here.