Should the atomic bombs have been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

World War II General WWII Discussion
#221

A side note to all this is that the former-Japanese Defense Minister was forced to step down recently --merely because he said something to the affect that he understood why the US used the atom bombs. There was a bit of a domestic uproar over it…

Japan’s Abe apologizes to Hiroshima A-bomb survivors over defense minister remark
The Associated Press
Published: August 5, 2007

TOKYO: Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe apologized Sunday over a former defense minister’s suggestion that the 1945 U.S. nuclear attacks were justified, and promised expanded medical support for survivors, officials and reports said.

Abe offered the apology as he met atomic bombing survivors in Hiroshima the day before the city was to mark the 62nd anniversary of the world’s first-ever nuclear attack on Aug. 6.

Defense Minister Fumio Kyuma resigned in July amid a public outcry after suggesting that the U.S. atomic bombings may have been justified.

Abe said he felt sorry that Kyuma’s remarks “hurt the feelings of the A-bomb survivors,” public broadcaster NHK reported.

“Now that 62 years have passed since the atomic bombings, we must provide fuller medical and welfare measures,” Abe told the survivors…

The rest here.

#222

Well, Estonia is tiny and no threat to anyone. I don’t think they’ll be marching in their little jackboots through Moscow anytime soon…

PDF makes some valid points regarding the Japanese though. Their neighbors and victims of their previous aggression routinely cringe at things like Japanese textbooks using terms like “advances” to euphemistically describe what was blatant aggression and a grab for national resources. I doubt they spend much time speaking on subjects like “The Rape of Nanking.”

However, as a former high school teacher that had two German foreign exchange students, I can tell you that they are inundated with Holocaust and WWII history, and a collective sense of nat’l guilt (one girl cried when I showed the “Why We Fight” episode of BoB)…

I once spent hours spellbound on the internet reading about the intricacies of the Japanese Defense Forces. Granted, it’s almost more like a civil service more than a military arm. But the technology and weapons potential is really quite impressive. I recall a Soviet era report on Japan that basically insinuated that the idea of the stringently controlled, pacified JDF was a myth, and that Japan essentially has the structure in place to rapidly rearm, field an army of several million, and become a major military power if they chose to do so…

#223

If Japan got mentioned agian… You know about the infamous Unit 731 horror deeds, right?

.

#224

Oh yes. And - the Imperial Army junior officer Chinese-civilian beheading contest (which was publicized in Japan incidentally almost like it were a football tournament), the ritualistic cannibalism of Allied airmen, the deaths of millions of Chinese civilians at the hands of Japanese occupiers, the systematic rape of “comfort girls,” etc…

None of this really “justifies” the deaths of Japanese civilians via atomic or firebombing. But it does provide some context, and somewhat dampens the image of the Japanese as ‘victims’ of hideous ‘US aggression.’ Especially when they’ve collectively refused to own up to any of it…

It’s a long list of horrors, really…

#225

In macro terms, I think it does.

Japan was a virulently racist and expansionist nation with contempt for every other race, notably Chinese and Caucasians, in the few decades before the war. It believed it had a right because of its racial superiority and national needs to take what it wanted, and to inflict suffering on lesser peoples. (I know the same can be said of America and the European colonial powers to some extent, but they’re not the ones whingeing about being bombed as a consequence of their military expansion.)

This attitude was the dominant attitude throughout Japanese society, as exemplified by the odious and well publicised beheading competition you mentioned, which was cheered on by much of the Japanese population. I cannot think of anything remotely comparable done by any other nation in the same era.

The bulk of the Japanese people supported the war in China and in due course in the Pacific. While it can be demonstrated that this was in part due to the control of education, news, and propaganda by the government and in time the militarists, the fact remains that the people, at all levels, mostly supported these actions.

I don’t care whether they were misled or not, any more than I care that Germans were misled into hating Jews. They could only get to those positions by abandoning basic humanity and morality. Once you’ve done that, you’re in no position to start moaning about whether on not what was done to you as a consequence of your own inhumane and immoral actions was inhumane or immoral.

While it’s convenient now for some in Japan and elsewhere to present the Japanese people as victims of the militarists, there was plenty of support for what the militarists did.

Most of the people killed in firebombing and nuclear raids were probably ardent supporters of Japanese expansion and all the cruelties and miseries it entailed, at least when things were going Japan’s way.

There are no grounds for complaining about reaping what they sowed, especially when the Japanese didn’t wring their hands over the barbarities they inflicted on millions of people in China and the Pacific at the time and still haven’t. And aren’t going to.

In micro terms, no, it doesn’t justify anything because some of the people who got hurt and killed wouldn’t have supported what their nation did. But the same was probably true of what happened in every bombing raid on civilians everywhere by every side.

#226

Just in the interests of balance, it wasn’t exclusively Japanese who perpetrated atrocities during WWII. Koreans and Formosans, and maybe other Chinese, serving with the Japanese were just as bad. That’s no different to various other nationalities that served with the Nazis. In each case it was an evil regime which unleashed this barbarity and in each the regime and nation which spawned it which has to bear the ultimate responsibility.

#227

Oh REALLY Nick if Estonia is so tiny the US could close the eyes for the marches of Waffen-SS veterans and monuments for the Nazy?
Does it mean that the mass crimes commited by the SS and Waffen-SS that were judged by the Nurenber Tribunal is a TINY?
And may be the handreds of thousands peoples ( mostly civilians) who were brutally burned or executed in the WHOLE EASTERN Europe by the SS/Waffen-SS punitive troops.

The criminality of organization SS as a whole was acknowledged as the Nuremberg international military tribunal, which decreed, that SS was used for purposes, which according to regulations are criminal and include pursuit and destruction of Jews, atrocity and murder in the concentration camps, the excesses, which were being accomplished during control of the territories occupied, putting in action of the program of the use of slave labor, brutal treatment with the prisoners of war and their murders.
Examining a question about SS,[b] tribunal included here all persons, who were officially accepted in the terms SS, including the troops SS (Waffen-SS), and the members of any kind of the police services.
Tribunal declares to criminal according to the determination of regulations the group, which consists of those, who were officially accepted in the terms SS, they were the members of this organization or remained its members, knowing that this organization is used for the accomplishment of the actions, determined by criminal in accordance with article 6 of regulations.
.
Nuremberg process. Collection of documents in 8 volumes

So may be the Nurenberg trubunal was mistaken?
And Waffen-SS was the GOOD unit that fought agains bolshevic occupation;)
In this way how we could trust the Tribunal in Japane with the “long list” of Japanes crimes?
Mate it seem the Japane was not so bad too - they fought against the WHITE occupation of Asia :slight_smile: Did not they…

#228

MAte you wonder me , the most of the MANY MILLIONS of peoples slaugtered in the East ( as much as even the Jappanes could not even dreamed) were the ardent supporters of the Fight with NAzy ( or had simphaty for the partisans and allied forces at all) and they all Hated the Nazy - does it mean the Nazy HAS the justification in MACRO level?

#229

You misunderstand him - he’s saying that because Japan launched an unjustified war of aggression/extermination, and the Japanese civilian population supported this war, they were a legitimate target because they deserved it. Not a view I personally agree with, although I can understand and perhaps sympathise with the reasoning.

#230

WEll mate are you sure that the SIMPLE Japanes even knew about the atrocities that the Japanes did in Asia?
Or may be the Japanes Propogandy Ministry did even spread about Raping In Nankin?
I/m seriously doubt that the Japanes supported the infamouse - war - they simply know nothing about the behavoiur of their army.
Like and the Germans - in fact the most of population of Gemrnay know nothing about death-camps - does it mean we need mass punish them?

I could understang the Rising Sun with his critical relation for the Japnes.
True the Japanes opinion about its participation in the WW2 is RATHER different for the western views. But tell me honestly - what will you do if the one state will test the nuke and killed your-relatives - i’m seriously doubt you will admit the “jastigfivation”?
I’m absolutly agree the Japanes should appologize for the mass crimes - but at the same time they has THE ALL RIGHTS to demans the APPOLOGIES FOR THE NUCLEAR bombing.
This should be the right decigion IMO.
However still we just hear the stupid"It was nessesary to stope the war and save the millions". This point could ONLY force the Japanes to think - is the west really want the peace?

Cheers.

#231

That’s exactly what he’s saying - including the statement that the beheading contest was covered in the Japanese press. I have no idea either way myself, so am not commenting either way

That I doubt. After Kristallnacht it was clear that the Jews were being savagely persecuted, as well as rounded up under inhuman conditions and shipped somewhere else from which they never returned. Furthermore, a substantial number of Germans will have lived near camps like Dachau or Bergen-Belsen. Frankly I don’t buy the arguament that most Germans knew little or nothing about the concentration camps. The only ones who didn’t were frankly wilfuly blind to them, and IMHO carry as much moral guilt as those who knew and did nothing.

Most of my family was in London during the war, being bombed. Indeed, my father spent the first year or so of his life under V-1/V-2 bombardment (note here that the bombardment of London started before any UK bombardment of German cities, so you can’t use the “they started it” arguament against the UK in this instance). I’m a little hazy on this (their experience of war is something none of my relatives talk about - I’ve only picked up snippets in odd places) but I would be very surprised if none of my relatives were killed or injured during the Blitz.
Despite this, and despite the Germans not having the “just cause” justification that RS is advocating in relation to Allied bombing of Japan, I have not once claimed that the German bombing of London was illegal.

You might, arguably, have a point there - as mentioned before I’m rather ambivalent about the uses aerial bombing was put to in WW2. However, the US/UK are at least prepared to admit that they carried out aerial bombing and express regret at the casualties caused - even if they are not prepared to apologise. Japan on the other hand refuses to even admit that it carried out crimes in the Far East (see for instance Japanese school textbooks on the Rape of Nanking), let alone express regret or consider an apology.

Incidentally, I’m ambivalent at best about apologies for acts done by generations no longer alive (e.g. current demands for Europe and the US to apologise for the Atlantic Slave Trade) - IMHO they are nothing but meaningless grandstanding. The only thing future generations owe is IMHO the acknowledgement that wrongs were committed and a commitment not to do the same thing again. IMHO Germany has very clearly done that over WW2, and the West has more or less done so over Area Bombing (if not quite to the extent that I would like to see - they have moved away from it, but never quite acknowledged the damage it did to noncombatants, at least officially). Japan has rejected war - to an even greater extent than Germany - but has done nothing else.

Ummm… you keep ignoring the fact that it seemed to work. Japan surrendered almost immediately after the second bomb, but it was a very near run thing. There was what came very close to a coup (put down after some fighting) by factions of the Army (IIRC) who wanted to continue the war. Given the rationale cited by the Emperor (something like the “war situation having turned not necessarily to Japan’s advantage”), it seems unlikely that this surrender would have taken place without all the Allied wins in the Pacific and SE Asia, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, the bombing campaign and both nuclear bombs.

#232

The contest was presented to the Japanese public as a contest to kill in combat. In reality these two glorious sons of Nippon were just slaughtering prisoners. There has been debate in some Japanese circles about whether they reached the claimed targets and whether anything actually happened. There wasn’t any debate before August 1945. The Japanese public lapped it up in 1937 when, as one of the officers says, killing Chinese was fun.

The following article was quoted in Timperley’s What War Means (American title: Japanese Terror in China) in 1938. It appeared in the Japan Advertiser, an American owned and edited English-language daily paper in Tokyo, on December 7, 1937.

SUB-LIEUTENANTS IN RACE TO FELL 100 CHINESE RUNNING CLOSE CONTEST

Sub-lieutenant Toshiaki Mukai and Sub-lieutenant Takeshi Noda, both of the Katagiri unit at Kuyung, in a friendly contest to see "which of them will first fell 100 Chinese in individual sword combat before the Japanese forces completely occupy Nanking are well in the final phase of their race, running almost neck to neck.

On Sunday when their unit was fighting outside Kuyung, the “score,” according to the Asahi, was: Sub-lieutenant Mukai, 89, and Sub-lieutenant Noda, 78.
On December 14, 1937, the same paper published another report that read:

CONTEST TO KILL FIRST 100 CHINESE WITH SWORD EXTENDED WHEN BOTH FIGHTERS EXCEED MARK

The winner of the competition between Sub-Lieutenant Toshiaki Mukai and Sub-Lieutenant lwao [Takeshi] Noda to see who would be the first to kill 100 Chinese with his Yamato sword has not been decided, the Nichi Nichi reports from the slopes of Purple Mountain, outside Nanking.

Mukai has a score of 106 and his rival has dispatched 105 men, but the two contestants have found it impossible to determine which passed the 100 mark first. Instead of settling it with a discussion, they are going to extend the goal by 50.

Mukai’s blade was slightly damaged in the competition. He explained that this was the result of cutting a Chinese in half, helmet and all. The contest was “fun,” he declared, and he thought it a good thing that both men had gone over the 100 mark without knowing that the other had done so.

http://www.geocities.com/nankingatrocities/Tribunals/nanjing_02.htm#bottom

Here’s one of the articles

from http://homepage3.nifty.com/m_and_y/genron/data/nangjin/hyakunin/tnn_a4_150.jpg

And the recent sequel is that, Surprise! Surprise! any allegation that anything the good lieutenants did was bad is wrong. They’re the victims of that grand international conspiracy which consistently portrays Japanese troops during WWII as brutal when in reality they were paragons of virtue.

Court Dismisses Chinese ‘Beheading Contest’ Libel Suit

By David Jacobson. Posted: 2005-08-25

The Tokyo District Court Tuesday dismissed a libel suit brought by the families of two soliders in the Japanese Imperial Army who were alleged to have participated in an infamous competition to be the first to behead 100 Chinese during the army’s advance on Nanjing in 1937. The families sought an apology and 36 million yen ($327,000) in damages from the two newspapers and a reporter who reported on the hotly debated incident.
The two soldiers, Toshiaki Mukai and Takeshi Noda, were sentenced to death by the Nanjing War Crimes Tribunal and executed in 1948.

Within a day of the ruling, however, the lawyer for the families told Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post that he will appeal the case as far as Japan’s Supreme Court.

The suit named the Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun, a predecessor of today’s Mainichi Shimbun, for its 1937 report on the incident. Written as if it were a sporting event, the original headline read: “New Record Set in 100 Beheading Contest – Mukai Reaps 106 vs. Noda’s 105 as Two Lieutenants Continue in Extended Play.” An image of the original story can be seen here.

It also named The Asahi Shimbun and its reporter Katsuichi Honda, who in 1971 investigated that report, and in a series of newspaper articles about Japanese atrocities in China, concluded that the original Tokyo Nichinichi story was true. He published the collected series as a book titled “Travels to China” the following year, and then in 1987, published another book focused more specifically on the army’s central China campaign which ended in the Nanjing Massacre. A compilation of all of these works was translated into English in 1999 and titled “The Nanjing Massacre: A Japanese Journalist Confronts Japan’s National Shame.”

According to a review by Edward Drea, of the U.S. Army Center of Military History, at the time it was written, Honda’s 1971 series in The Asahi caused a “sensation”:

“There was an immediacy and intensity to the gruesome depictions of the murderous and rapacious conduct of the Japanese army in China that made them fresh and powerful indictments of a military organization gone amok and a society unwilling to confront either that historical fact or its legacy.”

Ironically, Honda’s series also triggered a nationalist backlash and launched a revisionist movement, which has continued to challenge allegations of Japanese atrocities to this day. Explains Wikipedia,

“The truth of this incident is hotly disputed and critics seized on the opportunity to imply that the [100 head contest] episode, as well as the Nanking Massacre and all its accompanying articles, were largely falsified. This is regarded as the start of the Nanking Massacre controversy in Japan.”

Nevertheless, in his decision Tuesday, Judge Akio Doi noted that “the lieutenants admitted that they were in a race to kill 100 people” and therefore flatly rejected the suit. “We cannot deny that the article included some false elements and exaggeration, but it is difficult to say the article was fiction not based on facts. Since a final historical assessment on whether the contest of killing 100 people has not yet been made, we cannot say [the article] was obviously false.”

The court also said that Tokyo Nichinichi Shimbun could not be prosecuted as the 20-year statute of limitations on seeking damages expired many years ago.

The families of Mukai and Noda filed suit in April 2003, 66 years after the original report, claiming that they could “no longer tolerate the continued defamation of the two men,” according to the Japan Times. However, Chieko Suzuki of Japan’s Nanjing Research Association, claims that there may have been other factors involved. She noted that the 100 beheadings case was filed less than three weeks after Japan’s Supreme Court decided another libel suit in favor of Nanjing Massacre victim Li Xiuying, who had been charged with being a fraud. Writing in Shukan Kinyobi, a magazine edited by Honda, Suzuki asked:

“Why was a suit like this, one that challenges the existence of the hundred head contest, brought immediately after the court ruling in Li Xiuying’s favor? It was not brought simply out of spite for the lost litigation, nor due to a stubborn refusal to admit defeat… By rehashing the “hundred head” issue that ought to have been settled, they are trying to plant among the people a view of history that glorifies and affirms aggression in Asia.”

Guess who helped the descendants of the lieutenants with their libel case? Good old Higashinakano Shudo, a leading Japanese atrocity denier.

On the following day, January 22nd [2000], roughly 500 people gathered at a conference in Osaka, Japan, entitled “The Verification of the Rape of Nanking: The Biggest Lie of the 20th Century.” Former soldiers and historians gathered together to deny the so-called Rape of Nanking. The keynote speaker was Higashinakano Shudo, Professor of History at Tokyo’s Asia University, who claimed, “There was no massacre of civilians in Nanking.”[34]
] http://nanjingforever.web.infoseek.co.jp/nepilly.html

And what provoked this conference? An earlier court decision which arose from an allegation of atrocities by a Japanese soldier.

“There was a woman holding a child on her right arm … and another one on her left. We stabbed and killed them, all three - like potatoes on a skewer. I thought then, it’s been only one month since I left home … and thirty days later here I was killing people without remorse."[1]

These are the words of Azuma Shiro in his wartime journal. Azuma was a member of the WWII Japanese Imperial army, during what is often referred to as the “Nanking Massacre.” Azuma published his journal in 1987, under the title My Nanking Platoon: The Nanking Massacre Experienced by a Conscripted Soldier (Waga Nankin Puraton: Ichi Shoushuhei no Taikenshita Nanking Daigyakusatsu), with the intention of using it as a tool to bring people to an awareness of “the truth of Nanking.”[2]

On January 21st 2000, the Japanese Supreme Court found Azuma guilty of libel in a suit brought against him by Hashimoto Mitsuji, Azuma’s commanding officer during the Japanese occupation of Nanking.

http://nanjingforever.web.infoseek.co.jp/nepilly.html

#233

You’re right so far as the official record goes, in that the Japanese regime tightly controlled all information and consistently presented Japanese actions to the population in the best light.

It doesn’t alter the fact that the Japanese knew all about the invasions and victories in China and the Pacific and cheered themselves silly over each of them, and they were fully aware that they hadn’t been attacked or had war declared on them. They knew they were the aggressors and they bloody loved it while they were winning.

It doesn’t follow from government control of information that the Japanese people weren’t widely aware of Japanese atrocities, not least because what we see as atrocities they saw as ‘fun’ and glorious proof of Japanese superiority over lesser nations and beings.

The only way they couldn’t have known about them is if every soldier, sailor, merchant seaman, and civilian in the very large civil administrations who returned to Japan from China and the Pacific during the respective wars kept their mouths shut. This was impossible.

Ignorance also requires that the Japanese were unaware of the mistreatment of Allied POW’s brought from the Pacific, Burma etc in a terrible state to work in civilian industries all over Japan beside and under, frequently brutal, civilians where their mistreatment continued, because it reflected the same widespread Japanese contempt for and willingness to inflict suffering on inferior peoples that caused the atrocities outside Japan.

I don’t believe the Japanese were any more ignorant of what was going on with their troops and in their camps than the Germans were of what was happening in their concentration camps and on the Eastern Front. Sure, not everybody knew details, but these things always get around as a general understanding even under authoritarian regimes.

It’s just convenient for people that there’s no official record of what they knew, so people who lived down the road from a camp etc can say “We had no idea what was going on down there for the past few years. We thought it was just a soap factory.” Or whatever. As can Japanese who pored admiringly over pictures of daddy or brother or uncle lopping off someone’s head, getting their jollies from the humiliating death inflicted by beheading (contrary to popular belief, it’s not a noble act) the hated Chinese and Westerners.

#234

Sorry.

Everything I said in the last couple of posts, at least as far as China is concerned, was baseless and wrong, as shown by Mitsubishi’s defence a couple of years ago to claims by Chinese forced to work as labourers for Japan.

In startling closing arguments last September [2005], Mitsubishi issued a blanket denial of historical facts routinely recognized by other Japanese courts, while heaping criticism on the Tokyo Trials and openly questioning whether Japan ever “invaded” China at all. Mitsubishi has ominously warned that a redress award for the elderly Chinese plaintiffs, or even a court finding that forced labor occurred, would saddle Japan with a “mistaken burden of the soul” for hundreds of years.

http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/1823

If Mitsubishi said it didn’t happen, then it didn’t happen.

After all, Mitsubishi would know as it was one of the zaibatsu, the select group of powerful family corporations that pretty much controlled the Japanese economy to August 1945 (when the nasty Americans dropped a couple of nukes on Japan for no reason at all) and which would have profited from Japan invading China, assuming Japan invaded China, which it didn’t, and which would have used slave labourers, POW’s etc in its industries, which is something else it didn’t do, which makes it morally superior to a lot of German industry during the same period. :rolleyes:

#235

Frankly, I couldn’t care less if my relatives were nuked in a war (It wasn’t a test, but we’ve already done that to death. ;)) It’s just another way of dying or being injured among all the brilliantly vicious ideas mankind has dreamt up for wiping itself out over the past 150 years or so. What’s better: radiation sickness; anthrax; mustard gas; phosphorous burns; napalm burns; blast injuries; shrapnel; bullets, etc? Or being evaporated in a split second? I like the last idea best, along with being about a foot under a 25 pound or larger shell airburst. Instant oblivion is the way to go.

I’m absolutly agree the Japanes should appologize for the mass crimes - but at the same time they has THE ALL RIGHTS to demans the APPOLOGIES FOR THE NUCLEAR bombing.

They have no moral or any other right to demand an apology for, or even complain about, being nuked until they face up to what they did and atone for it because those are the actions which were the sole and direct cause of Japan being bombed by any type of bomb.

As my last few posts show, that ain’t ever gonna happen, unless a Japanese government has a reality enema and substitutes reality for the idiotic and arrogant concept of face which prevents it admitting that the land of the Divine Emperor could ever have been in error.

However still we just hear the stupid"It was nessesary to stope the war and save the millions". This point could ONLY force the Japanes to think - is the west really want the peace?

I really couldn’t give a stuff if that’s what the Japanese think, because it’s just another piece of selective and distorted thinking which makes sense to them only if, as they have been doing for some 52 years, they ingore what they did which brought the A bombs upon them. They never wanted peace, until they got beaten. And nuked.

Peace didn’t come because the West wanted it. It had been on the table for years, but it came when the Japanese wanted it. After they got nuked.

The only regret I have about nuking Japan is that it wasn’t done about 9 a.m. on 7 December 1941 (Hawaiian time) or better still 7 July 1937 (China time) with enough nukes to persuade Japan to surrender there and then. If that meant wiping out a fair slab of the Japanese people, so be it. It would have stopped them doing the same to tens of millions of innocent people in other countries.

Of course, that’s with the benefit of hindsight, and knowledge of what Japan did during the war in China and the Pacific. Two things that distinguish me from the arrogant morons who’ve been running Japan since 1945.

#236

Konzentrationslager were around since 1933, first for political opponents and such, so initially they were little more than prisons and perceived like that. Situation for the KZ inmates on german soil became worse only gradually, like small doses of poison applied over time. So some simple questions can point the direction for the likely state of mind of the vast majority in germany:

Are you interested in the living conditions of prisoners in an actual prison today?
How often do you actually see such a prison, even if you live really nearby (<5km) (and the nazi didn’t exactly put them on town squares like some prisons today)?
You might come to the conclusion, that even in your home town, the ground you cover more or less regularly is actually pretty small. Not to think of the vast areas between towns of which germany has plenty, even today.
There were definatly rumors about the conditions, but then again, most of the people had their own problems and were not exactly in a position to do anything anyway.

Now when it comes to the actual death camps this is an entirely different story. I don’t know how you get the idea, that the majority of the population (we’re talking millions here) had any idea of the mass extinction of people in gas chambers. Himmler was very sensitive about the secrecy of that “project”, as is evident from many sources.
Oh and btw. the Reichskristallnacht, as bad as it was, was still far away from transports in cattlewagons to Auschwitz, although the writing of something very bad was clearly on the wall.

Now on the actual topic.
It is purely speculative, but imho, Japan would’ve surrendered anyway and without an invasion for that matter. They were more or less completely cut off from supplies of all vital material for the industry, it is very unlikely, that they would’ve held out much longer. So one might come to the conclusion, that the use of the atomic bomb was little more than a field test under combat conditions and possibly a propaganda coup to intimidate the russian.
The whole problem with the issue is the fact, that the use of nuclear weapons still has some very negative side effects even today, despite the japanese best effort to clean it up. This must have been known to the people in command, i doubt the scientists didn’t tell them and so this incident to me marks the absolute low point in US history. They pretty much used the japanese as rabbits to test their 2 billion dollar investment.

#237

Like what? The delayed radiation effects are due to exposure to Gammas and fast Neutrons when the weapon initiated. The fallout was minimal from the Hiroshima and Nagasaki initiations, and has long since decayed to undetectable levels.

How perchance did you work this one out? Hiroshima was the first time in history that a Uranium bomb was initiated, while there had been a single test (Trinity) of the Nagasaki device. The instantaneous and long term radiation effects were simply unknown because there was nobody close enough to the Trinity test to get a large enough exposure. All US knowledge to this point was simply by calculation, and given the state of the art of the time this was very, very rough and ready. About the only thing they were reasonably sure of was that the device would not set fire to the atmosphere.
Incidentally, the first US experience with radiation sickness didn’t happen until some weeks after Hiroshima, when they had a criticality accident at Los Alamos. Prior to that, they simply had no knowledge of the effects of various doses on human beings - and unlike either the Nazis or Japanese had moral scruples about experimenting on human beings to find out the answers.

#238

Guess they should’ve asked Marie Curie :slight_smile:

#239

If they had done (and they most likely did), it would have been actively misleading. Radium emits α, β and γ radiation. The reason it is dangerous (and was implicated in the deaths of the Curies) is that the body treats it in a very similar way to Calcium and deposits it in the bones. There, the α and β radiation that would normally be unable to penetrate the skin are exposed to blood cells, etc. and so can be very heavily ionising. Gammas by comparison tend to be so penetrating because they simply don’t interact with anything. Chances are they’ll go straight through you without doing any damage.
Hence, what data there was for Radium exposure (more than just the Curies - “Radium jaw” was a well known medical condition even if the causes were obscure) was only for chronic, low level dosage of α and β radiation.

When a nuclear weapon initiates, the radiation given off initially comes in the form of very fast (and hence EXTREMELY damaging) Neutrons and Photons of various wavelengths (IR, Visible, Gamma Ray, etc. - exactly what you get depends on the altitude at which the device initiates). The overwhelming majority of cases of radiation sickness experienced at Hiroshima and Nagasaki (exactly what proportion is unclear - one of my nuclear engineering lecturers was of the opinion that ALL the cases were purely down to this and none to fallout) were caused by this exposure. At that point in history there was no experience of the effects of high doses of Gamma rays and Neutrons on the human body, simply because they had never been generated before. The only way to do so is either to climb inside an operating nuclear reactor, initiate a criticality accident or stand close to the initiation of a nuclear device. For obvious reasons nobody had been allowed inside the Hanford piles while they were operating, the first criticality accident on earth didn’t happen until a few weeks after Hiroshima, and nobody was going to stand close to the Trinity test for the simple reason they had no idea how powerful it was going to be.

Fallout simply isn’t a long-term issue with Hiroshima and Nagasaki because the weapon wasn’t powerful enough and was initiated too high. The really nasty stuff consists of dirt that was within the fireball of the initation and so gets irradiated. If I’m using my piecutter correctly (I’m still getting the hang of it) the fireball diameter for the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs was about 400m. That means for an airburst height greater than 200m (and the Hiroshima weapon initated at 580m) the only fallout will be material from the bomb itself - a few tonnes of material spread over several hundred square miles. Those very close to ground zero may have got doses of radiation from fallout sufficient to cause cancer in the long term, but they would frankly be long dead from the extremely high Neutron exposure, thermal pulse and blast they experienced when the weapon initiated.

As you may have guessed, I’ve done a fair bit of Physics and Nuclear Engineering :wink:

#240

The difference is that the prisoners in my country, and modern Germany, aren’t, before they’ve committed any offence other than just being Jewish by even remote maternal descent, the subject of discriminatory laws; virulent newspaper articles and pictures; virulent ‘documentaries’ and news reports in cinemas; public speeches by leaders from the Fuhrer down; popular rallies; bashings in the street by civilian mobs; destruction and looting of their businesses; the imposition of an absurd race fine to justify looting Jewish assets and to fund the coming war; widespread public humiliation and contempt; kicked out their jobs; denied jobs in the public service; and forced to wear yellow stars in public.

If people in my country were being treated so badly before they’ve even been carted off to prison by an oppressive and brutal regime which hated them, it would definitely occur to me that they would be a lot worse off in prisons run by that regime. (Pretty much the same way that it’s occurred to me and lot of others that our Government, after demonising so-called ‘illegal immigrants’ and politicising the issue to play to the meanest instincts of Australians, would make their lives hell in ‘detention centres’ which is exactly what’s been happening for a number of years here.)

However, the situation in Japan was different to Germany as the atrocities were directed towards non-Japanese and, in the main, occurred outside Japan.

There were, however, similarities with Germany which I pointed out earlier which make it impossible for at least a good number of civilians not to have knowledge of conditions in the camps in both countries, notably the use of camp labourers in primary and secondary industries. A couple of hundred scarecrows turning up in a factory and being used as ill-fed slave labour has to make even the meanest intelligence get some idea of what’s going on.

But the real point in Japan’s post-war position as the ‘victim’ of nuclear bombs is not what the Japanese knew before they were bombed but what they haven’t been told by their dishonest leaders (a fair number of whom were Class A and Class B war criminals) and education system since, and what Japan as nation has done to avoid facing up to what it did.

There is no comparison with Germany on that front. Germany as a nation faced up to what it did, tried to atone for it and got on with life. Expunging war guilt, to the extent it can be done, was done long ago by Germany as a nation.

Japan hasn’t even begun to do it. It’s not even thinking about it, as a nation in the sense that the nation has been represented by successive post-war governments, regardless of some tireless work by some courageous academics and others in Japan.

The unfortunate reality is that Japan’s post-war concealment of and internal propaganda about its wartime activities are a continuation of a milder form of exactly the same group-think processes that corrupted the minds of the Japanese populace in a different way leading to widespread support for the wars in China and the Pacific and the cruel treatment of everyone not Japanese.

Contrast the denial and revisionist propaganda in textbooks in Japan right now with the long-standing laws in Germany relating to Holocaust denial and Nazi symbols. Germany is determined not to let it happen again. Japan won’t even admit to itself that it happened.