My post from 2009 and, for Nagasaki, 2010.
My feeling is that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki saved far more lives than they cost. I hold that it is the height of revisionist history to claim that anything other than an invasion of the Japanese Home Islands would have ended the war, which would have cost a million or so Allied lives (mostly American) and tenfold or more Japanese lives.
Beyond that, the reality of what even a single low-yield atomic weapon could do to a large city was enough to cool the hot blood of most national leaders, especially once both sides of the Cold War possessed them. Even so, the world has come awfully close to seeing another nuclear war at least once or a few times.
The fear of widespread destruction if the Cold War went nuclear was eventually overtaken by the computer simulations of nuclear winter and later ones that showed that a climatic catastrophe would follow even a limited nuclear war.
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Tuesday, August 6, 2013
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Saved more lives than they cost? Probably. I still see them as tragedy not triumph. There was a "reenactment" again at Oshkosh this year, using FiFi and a wing of B25s. The pyro wall-of-fire made me turn away.
ReplyDeleteThough the night airshow / fireworks Saturday was awesome, and I did enjoy the "blow stuff up real good" massive wall of fire at the end.
Paul Fussell wrote a book called, "tThank God for The Atomic Bomb", which makes a very good case for the bomb having saved between 10's and 100's of thousands of lives, depending on how long you think the Japanese Imperial Forces would have kept at it.
ReplyDeleteI think 100,000s is a gross underestimate. It would have been in the millions.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I hope that book is more readable than "The Great War and Modern Memory". I'm finding that nearly impenetrable, probably because he makes copious references to English literary tradition and, other than Shakespeare, I don't know who any of those people were.
It Was a horrible thing to do, but so is War of any sort. It Did end the war, even if there were other ways also. I find it a sad thing that my country is the only one to ever "Nuke" another. Beyond that, all the words in the world won't change what happened.
ReplyDeletew3ski
In the aftermath of World War II, the Strategic Bombing Survey declared that, even without the atomic weapons and entry of the USSR into the War against Japan, Japan would have surrendered by the end of 1945 at the latest. The war would not have lasted for years, as you noted in your post on Hiroshima. I'll have to go with the War Department on this one.
ReplyDeleteYour reasoning in the Nagasaki post leaves something to be desired. I could easily give the argument:
*On August 8, 1945, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan.
*Japan surrendered six days later, on August 14.
*Therefore, the entry of the Soviet Union into the Pacific War caused Japan to surrender.
In June and July 1945, the Japanese government had been trying to arrange a conditional surrender, using the Soviet government as an intermediary to send messages to the United States. The main condition was that the emperor remain on the throne. Given that (a) once the Soviets got control of any part of Japan, they would never agree to a monarch, and (b) Vladivostok is on the Sea of Japan, once Stalin got involved, the Japanese government would have figured it was better to take its chances with the American government than letting the communists get control of the country.
There were War Department analysts in 1945-46 who made this argument. I wouldn't call them revisionists.
Given that the emperor was allowed to remain on the throne, and that the Soviet Union's entry into the war gave it a claim to putting its military in charge of northern Korea, it would have been better off if the U.S. had agreed to that one condition and accepted a surrender in June or July 1945.
That all presumes that the militarists who were running things would have gone along. I am not so sure that they would have.
ReplyDelete