Was talking to a friend of mine about the use of nukes and I was told about how it was the quicker way to save more lives. I’ve always heard this argument but still always believed that it was an extreme response that could have been avoided.
Am I naive in my thoughts here? What is everyone else’s interpretation of the events leading up to and the decision made to drop both bombs?
aimixin’s answer:
The argument people use to justify the mass murder of Japanese civilians in WWII goes like this:
Japanese civilians were all so crazy they’d fight to the last man.
The nukes pushed them into surrender and thus ended the war
Ending the war early saved lives.
However, this is just historical revisionism with not a shred of evidence to back it. In fact, the exact opposite is true. The US extended the war, possibly leading to the unnecessary deaths of many many Chinese and Japanese.
At the time the US dropped nuclear bombs on Japan, Japan was already willing to surrender and everyone knew it at the time.
An independent investigation into the matter after the fact based on a mountain of evidence of interviews with Japanese officials concluded the same thing.
Everyone was aware Japan already wanted to surrender.
The first and second argument people make are also self-contradictory. If Japanese were so crazy they’d “fight to the last man”, then why did the nukes work at all? The US killed more people firebombing Japan than they did with the nukes. They obviously did not care about civilian lives.
The truth is, they were already willing to surrender.
Why did the USA refuse to accept their surrender when everyone was aware of it? Primarily because the US insisted on unconditional surrender without negotiations, which the Japanese feared would cause them to lose their emperor.
Okay, so you might respond to this answer and say, “the mass murder of Japanese civilians is still justified because Japan’s emperor was bad and dropping the nukes let us get rid of the emperor!”
Right?
Nope.
The US allowed Japan to keep their emperor anyways.
Meaning the US extended the war for absolutely no reason and is responsible for every death because of it.
Despite the US letting Japan keep their emperor anyways, why did Japan accept unconditional surrender initially? Was it because the nukes?
Nope. It was because Japan had an ambassador in the USSR at the time named Naotake Satō. The reason the Japanese did not initially accept unconditional surrender despite being willing to surrender and despite believing their loss was inevitable, is because they had an agreement with the Soviet Union called the Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact which would make the Soviet Union a neutral player in the war, and thus the Japanese believed they could convince Stalin to leverage that position to negotiate an equal peace settlement, they wanted the USSR to broker the peace with the US rather than doing it on the US’s terms, because they thought they could get a better deal.
The Japanese were writing to him frantically throughout the war begging him to convince Stalin to broker peace. The reason the Japanese surrendered was because the Japanese were not aware that Stalin had made a secret deal with Franklin D Roosevelt at the Yalta Conference to invade Japan, something the Japanese had no awareness of.
When the USSR invaded Japan, Japan had no cards left but to accept the unconditional surrender.
Ultimately, this means not only does the overwhelming mountain of evidence show the nuking of Japan provided no material assistance to the US war in Japan, but that the US had intentionally extended the war with its absurd insistence on unconditional surrender which it would back down on anyways after the war was over, the US possibly extended the war by 2–3 months.
The historical revisionist claims about the Japanese apparently having no intention of surrendering and nuking them was necessary to prevent a land invasion is a post-hoc justification with no actual evidence supporting it.
I’m sorry If i missed some context, but can you provide the source of these quotes? Some of them are quite damning counterpoints to the long held story that keeps getting regurgitated to me whenever i question the necessity of nukes.
I have not chased them down. I have tried to contact this author once or twice with no response, or I would ask them