this post was submitted on 13 Aug 2023
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As awful as nuclear warfare is, people tend to think the moral calculation is easier than what is actually the case. For those unaware what was going on in China at the time:
The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which were the only things stopping this onslaught, caused between 129,000 and 226,000 deaths. this puts them (individually) in the ball park of the bombing of Tokyo (using traditional bombs).
There's a very solid argument to be made that nuclear bombs should never have been deployed, or developed for that matter. But the calculation of good and evil is a lot more complicated than people tend to accept.
People tend to forget that carpet bombing cities with millions of pounds of traditional and/or incendiary bombs was the status quo for all sides. Not even factoring in the troops that were soon to land on Japan, many more likely would have died from the continued bombing campaigns.
The common debate is that the bombs didn’t exactly force Japan to surrender, and that it was the threat of the imminent USSR participation in the war that did.
I believe the reason for this is that there are transcripts as well as timelines of the Japanese government’s upper echelons that sort of demonstrate the bombs didn’t have as big of an impact on them as a potential USSR participation.
But the whole thing is a bit hazy, and I have no doubts the bombs at the very least put a big amount of pressure on the Japanese government at the time.
From what I know there was a big "they only got one" mentality that pushes them to surrender when they realised they were wrong.
I'm lead to understand that using them on Japan wasn't really about Japan either. US officials knew that following the war, things were going to go south with the USSR, and so used the bombs as a show of force to the Russians.
Yeah I think anyone trying to reduce it to something as simple as good/bad is effectively lying by omission. Of course it was bad because a lot of people died in a particularly awful way but it was believed many more would’ve died had another path been taken. It’s not at all clear that imperial Japanese surrendered because of the bomb, but it was a contributing factor, I think tragedy is a good encapsulation