The evidence has become overwhelming that it was the entry of the Soviet Union on 8 August into the war against Japan that forced surrender but, understandably, this view is very difficult for Americans to accept. Once the USSR entered the war, the Japanese military not only had no arguments for continuation left, but it also feared the Soviet Union would occupy significant parts of northern Japan.
Truman could have simply waited for the Soviet Union to enter the war but he did not want the USSR to have a claim to participate in the occupation of Japan. Another option which could have ended the war before August was to clarify that the emperor would not be held accountable for the war under the policy of unconditional surrender. US secretary of war Stimson recommended this, but secretary of state James Byrnes, who was much closer to Truman, vetoed it.
By dropping the atomic bombs instead, the United States signalled to the world that it considered nuclear weapons to be legitimate weapons of war.
Those bombings precipitated the nuclear arms race and they are the source of all nuclear proliferation. Dropping the bombs was morally preferable to any other choices available. One of the biggest problems we have is that we can talk about Dresden and the bombing of Hamburg and we all know what the context is: Nazi Germany and what Nazi Germany did. Bear in mind that for every Japanese non-combatant who died during the war, 17 or 18 died across Asia-Pacific.
Yet you very seldom find references to this and virtually nothing that vivifies it in the way that the suffering at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been. For example, in the food situation would have become catastrophic and there would have been stupendous civilian deaths. It was only because Japan surrendered when it still had a serviceable administrative system — plus American food aid — that saved the country from famine.
Another thing to bear in mind is that while just over , people were killed in total by the atomic bombs, it is estimated that ,—, Japanese people many of whom were civilians died or disappeared in Soviet captivity. Had the war continued, that number would have been much higher. Critics talk about changing the demand for unconditional surrender , but the Japanese government had never put forth a set of terms on which they were prepared to end the war prior to Hiroshima.
The inner cabinet ruling the country never devised such terms. When foreign minister Shigenori Togo was told that the best terms Japan could obtain were unconditional surrender with the exception of maintaining the imperial system, Togo flatly rejected them in the name of the cabinet. The fact is that there was no historical record over the past 2, years of Japan ever surrendering, nor any examples of a Japanese unit surrendering during the war.
This was where the great American fear lay. Once sympathetic to the argument that the atomic bomb was necessary, the more research I do, the more I am convinced it was one of the gravest war crimes the US has ever committed.
The radiation has affected people who survived the blast for many years and still today thousands of people suffer the effects. There were possible alternatives that might have ended the war. The authors of the draft of the declaration believed that if the Soviets joined the war at this time it might lead to Japanese surrender but Truman consciously avoided that option, because he and some of his advisors were apprehensive about Soviet entry.
The second option was to alter the demand for unconditional surrender. Some influential advisors within the Truman administration were in favour of allowing the Japanese to keep the emperor system to induce so-called moderates within the Japanese government to work for the termination of the war. However, Truman was mindful of American public opinion, which wanted unconditional surrender as revenge against Pearl Harbor and the Japanese atrocities.
However, one atrocity does not make another one right. Not only did the bombs end the war, the logic goes, they did so in the most humane way possible. However, the overwhelming historical evidence from American and Japanese archives indicates that Japan would have surrendered that August, even if atomic bombs had not been used — and documents prove that President Truman and his closest advisors knew it.
The allied demand for unconditional surrender led the Japanese to fear that the emperor, who many considered a deity, would be tried as a war criminal and executed.
A study by Gen. Allied intelligence had been reporting for months that Soviet entry would force the Japanese to capitulate. Truman also knew that the Soviet invasion would knock Japan out of the war. Fini Japs when that comes about. The Soviets invaded Japanese-held Manchuria at midnight on Aug. They could not fight a two-front war, and the threat of a communist takeover of Japanese territory was their worst nightmare. Prime Minister Kantaro Suzuki explained on Aug. The perspective of the Japanese is, unsurprisingly, utterly different.
This is despite the fact that an ever-smaller proportion of Japanese people still survive from the average age of the hibakusha — the victims who directly experienced the bombing — is now well over 80 years old. Other nations, too, would seem to approve less of nuclear attacks than the US, at least if snapshot surveys are anything to go by.
People in the US were notably less likely to agree compared with citizens of the UK and France, which are also nuclear powers. They found that the people in their study were actually more likely to make a decision based on the effectiveness of the weapon and whether or not it would lead to escalation, rather than shunning nuclear weapons as inherently wrong or taboo.
Yet Brian Rathbun of the University of Southern California argues that there is more nuance to the morality of the decision-making displayed in this study than first appears. Psychologists and neuroscientists once studied moral decision-making predominantly through the lens of harm, fairness and concern for other people.
When a conservative supports policies like the death penalty, torture or military force, they are not setting aside their ethical values, even if a liberal might strongly disagree. And a liberal supporting a protest movement that leads to public disorder and violent clashes with authority might find disagreement with their political opponents, but they are guided by what they believe is moral. At least , were killed and many tens of thousands of people were injured with burns and worse Credit: PD.
They also, perhaps unsurprisingly, were more likely to endorse the actions of a leader who had launched a nuclear attack. People with these binding and retributive values were also less likely to abandon their position as civilian casualties rose. However, they were not indifferent — support for the nuclear option dropped fairly steeply once the casualties exceeded 10,, and was very low in all groups by the time the death toll reached a million.
What matters, says Rathbun, is that public opinion has the power to influence the likelihood of a nuclear launch.
And as historical trends in polling have shown, public attitudes towards nuclear weapons can shift over time. One recent study, for example, found that public backing for the ban on US nuclear tests has declined since Meanwhile, the current US administration is reportedly contemplating a resumption of testing on American soil. Human beings just cannot help but moralise. Marking the anniversary of the bombings in present-day Japan Credit: Getty Images. There is one final moral dimension to consider when exploring the rights and wrongs of nuclear weapons, which was articulated by the Oxford University philosopher Toby Ord in his recent book The Precipice.
These figures are based on information given us in Tokyo and on a detailed study of the air reconnaissance maps. They may be somewhat in error but are certainly of the right order of magnitude. W as Japan already beaten before the atomic bomb? The answer is certainly "yes" in the sense that the fortunes of war had turned against her.
The answer is "no" in the sense that she was still fighting desperately and there was every reason to believe that she would continue to do so; and this is the only answer that has any practical significance. General MacArthur's staff anticipated about 50, American casualties and several times that number of Japanese casualties in the November 1 operation to establish the initial beachheads on Kyushu.
After that they expected a far more costly struggle before the Japanese homeland was subdued. There was every reason to think that the Japanese would defend their homeland with even greater fanaticism than when they fought to the death on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. No American soldier who survived the bloody struggles on these islands has much sympathy with the view that battle with the Japanese was over as soon as it was clear that their ultimate situation was hopeless. No, there was every reason to expect a terrible struggle long after the point at which some people can now look back and say, "Japan was already beaten.
That this was not an impossibility is shown by the following fact, which I have not seen reported. We recall the long period of nearly three weeks between the Japanese offer to surrender and the actual surrender on September 2. This was needed in order to arrange details: of the surrender and occupation and to permit the Japanese government to prepare its people to accept the capitulation. It is not generally realized that there was threat of a revolt against the government, led by an Army group supported by the peasants, to seize control and continue the war.
For several days it was touch and go as to whether the people would follow their government in surrender. The bulk of the Japanese people did not consider themselves beaten; in fact they believed they were winning in spite of the terrible punishment they had taken.
They watched the paper balloons take off and float eastward in the wind, confident that these were carrying a terrible retribution to the United States in revenge for our air raids. We gained a vivid insight into the state of knowledge and morale of the ordinary Japanese soldier from a young private who had served through the war in the Japanese Army. He had lived since babyhood in America, and had graduated in from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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