Coherence

[TheFaithfulStone]

The invasion of the Japanese mainland was estimated to cost 500,000 American casualties. At the time, American war planners were estimating a seven to one ratio of American casualties to Japanese casualties, based on their experiences in Saipan (where only 300 Japanese prisoners were taken, and the Japanese military hurried civilians off of sea cliffs into the ocean.)

 

Even provided that the casualties rates were more along the lines of the Okinawa invasion (1:2 American vs. Japanese) that's 1 million Japanese casualties.

 

Furthermore, those numbers are "battlefield" casualties only. They do not include the inevitable civilian deaths, deaths for illness and accidents, etc.

 

In fact, the US military, which was set for an amphibious invasion of the Japanese home islands, minted so many Purple Hearts in anticipation of wounded, that they were still using them during the Bosnian campaign.

 

Compare this staggering amount of lost life and destruction to (relative) concentration and limited death caused by the two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. (199,000 Japanese casualties)

 

Add to this mix the fact that Japanese were informed (though in admittedly vague terms) about the atomic bomb before it was dropped and declined to surrender. They were offered another chance after the first bomb was dropped, and declined, provoking an attack from the Russians against what remained of their Mongolian forces, and a second atomic attack.

 

It's a bloody sort of calculus, to be sure, and without a doubt the most difficult ethical decision a man has ever had to make.

 

But, unbelievable as it may seem, dropping atomic weapons on Japan, killing 200,000 Japanese civilians, probably saved millions of lives, and without a doubt, was the more merciful act toward the Japanese, and certainly the better strategic decision for the US.

 

TFS

some links

Casualty Projections

Avalon Project

Timeline of Surrender

[Qfwfq]

We've all heard this countless times but, why would it have otherwise been necessary to invade Japan?

[TheFaithfulStone]

That's true. You could have "starved them out."

 

A siege of Japan was predicted to last 1 to 2-1/2 years and result in 3.5 to 4 million casualties. That doesn't sound like a better solution.

 

The Japanese were at war with the Western World. They were the ones who repudiated the Potsdam offer, and also declined to surrender after the first atom bomb.

 

Since they had shown their intent to attack us (by actually doing so) it doesn't make any sense for us to just LET them do it.

 

I mean, you could argue strict pacifism here, and say, yeah, we should all just try to get along - but that only works when everybody's a pacifist. As demonstrated by The Rape of Nanking, The Baatan Death March, Saipan, etc, the Japanese were far from pacifists.

 

There are two ways to deal with a fox in the hen house. You kill or capture the fox, or you give up on hens.

 

TFS

 

edit:

 

Let it be known that I agree that the only "coherent" ethical system is strict pacifism (Maybe that's why people keep suggesting it? Buddha, Jesus, Ghandi.) I'm addressing the specific allegation that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were acts of terrorism. Perhaps by the strict definition of "an attack designed to achieve a goal by using terror of attack as it's primary persuasive means" they were - but if you mean terrorism as it's used currently "an attack against non-combatants specifically BECAUSE they're non-combatants to achieve a political goal" then no, they weren't by any stretch.

[Qfwfq]

The Japanese declined to surrender after the first atom bomb, yes, and many soldiers refused to surrender individually even when they had received the news of their own emperor's surrender. That's a matter of mentality and it was the only thing that was holding up the situation, the Nazi-Fascists had already lost totally. Why would a siege have meant so many casualties? I believe it depends on how it would have been conducted, I don't argue on the estimates published by the US gov't at the time. Look at all the things the current one has said in justifiation of Iraq.

 

How to deal with a fox in the hen house? You shooh the fox out with a big stick, and you fix the henhouse up so the fox (or any of the other ones around) can't get in again. I wasn't supporting a turn-the-other-cheek pacifism without defence.

[TheFaithfulStone]

Well, you still would have had to invade Kyushu in order for the blockade to work. That's on the order of 100,000 casualties right there.

 

At the end of the war Japan was not utterly helpless. They still had their home garrisons, and of course, several million civilians encouraged to kill themselves in resistance (suicide bombers.) This means that any effective siege would have had to include conventional bombing - which of course, was just as destructive as the atomic bomb. The bombing of Tokyo actually caused more deaths than Hiroshima or Nagasaki.

 

I think in this case, the fox had been shooed. The question now was how to fix the henhouse. The analogy breaks down here, because in a military situation, there is simply no way to keep the enemy from attacking. You can keep him from achieving his goals - but that costs casualties from your side.

 

As for US casualties figures, I don't think the army had any interest in overestimating the casualty figures for an invasion. Most of the officers doing these analyses weren't privy to the knowledge that the atomic bomb even existed.

 

Anyway - the point is that dropping the atom bomb cannot be considered a terrorist act - not if it was a good tactical decision.

 

Regardless of what we know now, we know that Truman and the US Commanders believed it would cost half a million American casualties to invade Japan. There is no reason to believe that the primary reason for the decision to drop the atomic bomb was any other than to spare American (and Japanese) lives.

 

If you want to talk about morally incoherent American actions, let's talk about Abu Gahraib, Haditha, and Mai Lai.

 

TFS

[Boerseun]

So why not bomb an unpopulated forest first, so as to illustrate the power of The Bomb? And maybe kill a few hundred rabbits and a couple of birds?

 

History, unfortunately, is written by the victors. The defeated side is always the bad guy.

[TheFaithfulStone]

Didn't we already blow up a bunch of desert right here at home?

 

Marshall didn't think Japan would surrender after the two bombs - and had actually ordered seven more to support the land invasion, so blowing up a bunch of trees probably wouldn't have done much good.

 

I don't know, I think this is one of those moral dilemmas thats... not really a dilemma. It seems awful beyond compare to drop atomic bombs on cities - but how much worse is it firebomb them? Or to experience a million casualties on your own side?

 

TFS

[Qfwfq]

Boeseun, they had considered dropping the A-bomb on Japanese soil just to show the people the fireworks but various such proposals were discarded.

 

Faith, you seem to be keeping to some assumptions that I have already challenged. I still think it all depends on how things were done and I'm not so sure the Japanese would have been in quite the position to carry out another Pearl Harbour, if there was appropriate defence and deterrence.

[TheFaithfulStone]

What that there would have been between 500,000 and a million American casualties?

 

On what grounds do you challenge the assumption? It is known that military planners believed this to be the case. That is not in doubt. If they were right or not who knows, but they did the math and it came out to 500,000 of ours + however many of theirs or 200,000 of theirs.

 

I can't think of an ethical framework where that decision (although certainly a difficult one to make) isn't a foregone conclusion.

 

As for whether there was an alternative to dropping the bomb - there may have been. Maybe dropping one on top of Mt. Fuji would have been sufficiently impressive, planners at the time didn't think so.

 

What I'm saying is that the motivations behind the atomic attack are pretty well documented. And NOWHERE does it come up that we were going to attack civilian targets not in spite of but because they were civilian targets in an effort to sow mass panic among the citizenry.

 

That's the litmus test for terrorism, and clearly the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs cannot be considered terrorism.

 

Now, if what if we had dropped a bomb on a "unimportant" area of Japan, calculated to maximize civilian casualties, in the hopes that it would forment a mass panic and then we could move in? That might qualify as terrorism.

 

What if we bombed schools in Iraq or Afghanistan, not as accidents or "collateral damage" but as a specific objective - so that people would be afraid to let their children out and we could go round them up easier?

 

Terrorism is the attacking of non-combat targets because of their status as non-combat targets in the hope of spreading terror and panic among non-combatants.

 

TFS

 

edit: This makes no sense.

Anyway - the point is that dropping the atom bomb cannot be considered a terrorist act - not if it was a good tactical decision

 

The idea was that if the decision was made for tactical reasons, and not as an intentional act of terror, then it wasn't an "act of terrorism" not that all good tactical decisions are automatically not terrorism.

[Qfwfq]

You appear to have missed which assumptions I had challenged.

 

Dropping the bomb on Fuji would certainly have been impressive enough.. and it would pass your litmus test! Dresden certainly passes it.

[sanctus]

I actually think the nuking was to impress not the Japanese, but the rest of the world as to where America saw itself in the post-war world, militarily speaking..

 

From what I always heard one of the main reasons of the nuking was to try the bomb for real after having tried a little in the desert (manhattan project if i remember right). The us sent in a photograph right after the bombing charged to take pictures of everything, not to help people, ergo to study all the effects of the bomb.

That's also the reason why they didn't drop the bomb on a mountain/forest they had already tried it in inhabited land now they needed to try habited land. And additionally they can have a good conscience because they warned the japanese saying that if they wouldn't retreat something big would happen.

[IDMclean]

On August 6, 1945 the nuclear weapon Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima by Enola Gay, a U.S. Air Force B-29 bomber which was altered specifically to hold the bomb, killing an estimated 80,000 people and heavily damaging 80% of the city. In the following months, an estimated 60,000 more people died from injuries or radiation poisoning. Since 1945, several thousand more hibakusha have died of illnesses caused by the bomb. It was the second such device to be detonated (the first being the successful test at the Manhattan Project's desert test site, in New Mexico), and the first ever to be used in military action. The American atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were arguably major factors leading to the surrender of the Japanese government six days after the latter attack.

 

On 9 August 1945, Nagasaki was the target of the world's second atomic bomb attack at 11:02 a.m., when the north of the city was destroyed and an estimated 39,000 people were killed outright with another 75,000 believed to have died of bomb-related causes in the decades that followed.

 

To me it is an absurdity that the law, which expresses the common will and detests homicide, should itself commit one and, in order to keep citizens from committing murder, order a public one commmitted.

 

If you kill one person you are a murderer If you kill ten people you are a monster If you kill ten thousand you are a national hero

 

The death of a single human being is too heavy a price for the vindication of any principle, however sacred.

 

So yah. I would lean towards Terrorism, we dropped the bombs, to induce terror to halt a (dying) war. That is terrorism.

[TheFaithfulStone]

Dropping the bomb on Fuji would certainly have been impressive enough.. and it would pass your litmus test! Dresden certainly passes it.

 

Well, I agree that maybe it was something that should have been tried. The people making the decisions at the time didn't think so.

 

I don't know about Dresden being terrorism either, although it seems to me that it was more clearly the wrong decision than Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It's more of an iffy scenario because the motivations for it aren't as clearly documented.

 

Which particular assumptions are you challenging, so that I may refute your challenges, Q? :)

 

ALSO:

The death of a single human being is too heavy a price for the vindication of any principle, however sacred.

 

I don't think that's true. There are principles I would willingly die for, and consider it a bargain.

 

TFS

[Qfwfq]

The type of assumption I challenge is that it was necessary to either invade Japan or hold up a siege that would have cost so heavily. I'm sure that combat, excepting defense and prevention, could have been avoided, with organization of all affiliated authorities concerned. This just wasn't the mentality that analists, generals and politicians held. They could only think in terms of winning.

 

The real purpose of the bomb was to show everybody, and not only the Japanese.

[TheFaithfulStone]

The real purpose of the bomb was to show everybody, and not only the Japanese.

 

Do you have any evidence of that? Truman said that is motives were to spare American lives which would surely be lost in an invasion.

 

So...

 

I guess I just don't see how you win a war without defeating the enemy? Even if you invade Kyshyu (which you would have had to have done for an effective interdiction) you lose 100,000 Americans. (And that was only to control the lower third of the island.)

 

In any case, your assessment of the tactics of the situation may be correct, (I disagree, but it's too late to change it now..) but just because something was a poor tactical decision doesn't make it terrorism.

 

TFS

[IDMclean]

The easily overlooked aspect was this:

We were looking to INVADE in the first place. It is always stupid to attack someone on home territory. Invasion is something one does to TAKE a given portion of land, not someone does in defense. The war at that point was pretty much over, and it could have simply been ended by blockade of military forces. Such that the Japanese could not send out forces to attack other places. Perhaps use some artillery to batter the japanese bases, I mean seriously do you know what the range is on a battleship? Keep a few contigents of Anti-air in a shell pattern, with the help of other nations we could have just held them, as they kicked and screamed, until they wore themselves out.

 

It's like a little kid throwing a tempertantrum. Ignore them if they don't kick and if they do, then restrain. You don't put a gun to their heads and shot them, for kicking.

[TheFaithfulStone]

Doesn't matter. Maybe there was a better decision than to drop the bomb, that doesn't mean that dropping it was terrorism.

 

You're arguing the tactics of the decision - which you weren't there to make. I still maintain that it can't be considered terrorism because the motives were (oddly enough) humane.

 

TFS