I'm just curious. Did it end up saving lives? Was Japan finished even before the bombs were dropped or not? I'm especially interested in the later question because it's difficult to find information on it. Any resources and documents on the matter are appreciated also.

I think they were. I've heard about some conspiracy theory where they deployed the weapons to scare the Soviets... I think that was considered, but I doubt it was the final deciding factor.

Besides, history shows that they worked.

I'm not really sure. After Germany had lost i'm sure Japan wouldn't have continued fighting for long whatever had happened. It probably did stop them faster but I don't think killing civillians with a nuclear weapon instead of soldiers in battle was a good idea.

Let's see if I can remember what I learned in my American history class in high school... The atomic bombs were necessary as Japan would not have stopped otherwise. Truman had to decide whether to drop the bomb or to invade Japan, a decision that would have cost many more American lives.

We could've won the war without them, they just helped us win it faster.

Yes. We were prepping a third bomb when Japan finally surrendered. If we hadn't have ended the war as soon as we did, the Russians would have been more heavily involved. The Japanese scared us from invading the main land. Their propaganda showing every man, woman, and child as people who were able and willing to fight any wave that America would throw at them made the U.S. carefully consider the success of a massive assault. At least we prevented the Russians from stepping in and claiming half of Japan like they claimed Eastern Europe.

They were not neccesary. But losing tens of thousands more american lives was more unneccesary.

They had to be set off over someone's enemy territory sometime. After the horror, the world kinda got a little more cautious. Good thing that it's in the past and we aren't still waiting for it.

Hey, Japan attacked us at Pearl Harbor right out of the blue, I think a couple nukes served 'em right.

I believe it was considered. If the Soviets invaded Japan, that would be bad news.



Er...no

Well, I think it would have cost more lives on both sides. I don't have any sources or the time to look them up at the moment, but I believe the firebomb raids that were conducted were extremely deadly and resulted in 100,000+ deaths after raiding one city.

If we used firebomb raids instead of nukes, I think the death toll would have been higher. Also, firebombs don't demonstrate as much power as nukes so I doubt any surrender would have been as hasty.

Japan ws "finished", in the sense that they had lsot the war, but they weren't going to surrender. The campaign to invade Japan would have been very costly for the US and Japan in terms of people.

Great attitude! Let me guess we should also nuke all of the middle east?

They were necessary based on the enemy. The Pacific Tour wasn't like the European tour where you would take prisoners of war and such. The Japanese were f'ing insane, and would kill an American whenever they had the chance, no matter the circumstances.

Even Yamamoto knew that they would never win ("If I am told to fight... I shall run wild for the first six months... but I have utterly no confidence for the second or third year."). But that still didn't change the fact that the Japanese would continue to fight. The Japanese had Operation Ketsi-go ready, which it's objective was to kill as many American lives as possible, not win. And in turn, that would make the support for the war in the US run dry, and maybe make the US sue for separate peace.

Does it really matter how we killed them? We would've killed a helluva lot of Japanese anyway, with our invasion force and constant night raids.

All in all, I support the bombs.

You also have to take into account Russia and Germany. Would Germany have surrendered without Japan surrendering first? What would Russia have done in the what, 1-2 years it would have taken to invade Japan? I'd be more worried about the politics and balance of power than death toll. I mean, if the balance of power had shifted towards Russia or Germany, things could have been a lot worse.

Was it necessary? No.
Did it save lives? Arguably yes.

Germany was taken care of before Japan surrendered..

Hmm, the first bomb maybe. How much time did the U.S. give for Japan to surrender after dropping the first bomb?

both. the war needed to come to an end. it was the realization that one side had the ultimate weapon was a factor in ending the war.

Yes, it was very necessary. Considering what they did to the Chinese and were doing to us, yeah they needed some sense knocked into them. No doubt casualty counts would've gone to unbelievable peaks if they had been allowed to continue their progress into insane warfare.

Frankly, swift kills like that to end a bloody war is less inhumane than what they did.

They wouldn't have given up without direct orders from HIGH command positions.

Anybody remember the trio of soldiers that wouldn't give up their spot in the Phillipines, the final one surrendered or was captured in the late 70s. I think...

That's loyalty.

Voted no because of the way in which the question is worded. Obviously they weren't necessary; we could have beaten Japan without them. I also suspect that the number of lives saved wasn't as high as most claim it was. National populations just don't tend to fight to the last man or really anywhere close. The self-preservation instinct is too strong in most people to allow that kind of thing.

That said, I do think lives were saved by the dropping of the atomic bonds, and that their quick use helped keep the Russians from gaining a foothold in Japan.

We all ready hurt Japan greatly. We burned that country to the ground. We used incindiaries and they had a lot of wooden homes. Going along with the lines of Emon. I think we did it to show the world that we're the powerful nation now. We have the ultimate weapon not the Soviet Union. At least not until 1952(?).

You have to understand the culture. The average westerner would give up, but were talking about people who would commit suicide to preserve their honor. Now couple that thought with a fanatical hatred toward Gaijin and the result is quite different from what you would expect.

The US feared a fight with the civilian populatin as well as the Japanese armed forces. With as fanatical as the Japanese miliary was, I have little doubt a good number of civilians would have joined the fight as well. They would have been slaughtered.

The way I see it, the American government probably figured that having that many people of the enemy's nation die was better than having that many of our own people die.

Or something along those lines. You should be able to figure out what I mean.

Wow talk about beating a dead horse. This argument is so damn repetitive. It's been speculated on non stop and I think we can all agree that it was unfortunate but probably necessary to save lives.

It's not really a conspiracy theory.. It was used to finish the japanese off quickly, but also to say ot the Soviets "Hah hah hah! Look what we can do! Don't even think of backstabbing us, n00bs."

Jumpstarted the cold war. Especially when USSR was all "Uh.. stfu. We rtfm'd and haxed and ***** u."

Swift? What about all the people who burned slowly, or died from radiation, fire etc. Think of all the INNOCENT (aka. after the war) who were born with birth defects and all that.

I don't like people dieing, but alot of regular bombs could have done the same thing as an a-bomb without the horror of the after effects.

Killing thousands of innocent people wasn't required.

Innocent pedestrians > Millitary personel

I didn't read the thread, so excuse me if this has already been said.

Was using the atomic bomb necessary? In my opinion, no. We would have invaded Japan and ended the war anyway. However, the atomic bomb did hasten that surrender with less blood shed.

btw, both Hiroshima and Nagasaki were picked because of their military and industrial value to Japan. It was obvious civilians would die no matter what, so might as well take out some military installations as well.

Pearl Harbor was an act of extreme stupidity.

If you watched the movie, Pearl Harbor, right after they're done with the attack a lieutenant tells the Japanese General that the mission had been a success. After that, the General tells him that "I fear we may have just awaken a sleeping giant". Well that's about as accuracte as you could put it, because America got pissed, and so we retaliated and demolished them.

I don't think we knew of the environmental issues, and I can understand why the decision was made the way it was, even though I can't really say I approve of it "morally speaking."

You might think that, but it's really hard to tell now. There were a couple of older generals in the military that wanted to surrender, but most of the young ones (most of them) wanted to keep fighting to the death or at least have one final glorious battle (for the mainland). Also, it's impossible to predict how the soldiers in the army and the civillians on the mainland would have acted. This was a different world and a different Japan. The US was worried that once they put the Emperor in direct danger the army would fight harder and civillians would start to fight as well. And that's not just some random reason they made up. Japan was still a warrior culture in ways. Okinawa was still fresh in the minds of the US planners. Okinawa was one of the bloodiest battles of the war just because the Japanese refused to surrender. They fought to the very end of the island, often pressing civillians into arms. It was not happy.

Now, there are numbers from the military planners that predict that the battle for the main island would have been relatively easy, but I'm not so sure about those numbers because again, the Japanese were hard to predict. It is certainly true however that the numbers of saved American lives Truman gave in justification for the bombs were much higher than those predicted lives lost by the military planners. :O

I had to write a paper on this for my US History class. That thing was a real *****. My argument ended up as "Necessary? No. Justified? Certainly."

Hindsight. I don't think anyone knew that the after affects were going to be as bad as they were.

For quick victory, yes.

For cool explosions, no.

Well, at least the USA got the highly dubious honour of being the one and only country that ever used nuclear weapons against enemy targets (a nice boost on the barometer of militarism). Although I have always thought they helped to end the war a lot sooner, it's still a drastic measure, as demonstrated by the fact that they haven't been ever used in war again, and it has been 60 long years already. I think that also shows the USA wasn't generally happy they used them, which is a healthy attitude.


Of course they did. They just didn't have a choice or didn't care. Or they were fools. Pick your own choice...

At the time, yes. Leave it alone :P.

It's funny that we never achieved unconditional surrender---even after dropping the bombs. Too bad we didn't try to negotiate (and I don't mean issue a vague ultimatum) before killing so many innocents.


Alternatives to bombing:

*Demonstration:

Advantages: would still start the Cold War with the US on top, less death
This approach might have failed to produce surrender, but I think combined with Russia entering the war and the devestation that we already did (the REAL debate should be if firebombings like we did in Tokyo and Dresden were justified) that they might have accepted the terms we finally agreed to (Emperor = immune from war trials and what not).

Even if the demo failed, we could've moved on with Hiroshima.


* We could've dropped just one bomb.

Nagasaki was NOT ordered direclty by Truman. He issued an order to release more bombs as they became available and Groves accelerated the production of the plutonium bomb. Some say that Nagasaki was even a bit of a surprise to Truman himself. Three days was NOT enough time.


The problem is that the bombings are so linked together that it seems that if one was justified, so was the other. Only one person on this thread has tried to distinguish between the two bombings other than myself (or so I think, apologies to anyone I missed). Also, as someone mentioned, our American history classes teach a lot of misleading facts. The government controlled public discourse on the bombings for a good deal of time until things became assumed. There was a time when the effect of radiation was heavily disputed---this was a tactic to make the atomic bomb seem coventional, to link it to the justification of the firebombings.

The death estimate that Truman referred to often kept rising till his death, there's a reason for that. It's high time we at least rethought our assumptions on this issue. Too much Cold War propaganda has been asserted as truth. Look, Hiroshima and/or Nagasaki may be justified, but it's really good to see it debated before that conclusion is made. This thread rocks.





Aside from the fact that I think revenge is a slippery slope when hate of the Japanese and wish to preserve peace by fighting a dangerous enemy is blurred... we sure got those damn japs when we burned the flesh of children and locked up the spies on our own territory, etc.

But it's interesting you use that example. There's a lot of interesting analysis related to how FDR provoked Pearl Harbor, awakening a sleeping giant... eh? I'd rather save that debate for another time though. I work in the morning.

I must admit that I admire this post. It's something that has to be considered but is almost immediately shut down by patriotism (which I am becoming increasingly tired of).