I too watched "The Untold History of The United States". But to assume its 100% accuracy is silly. A mere blockade would have done nothing to encourage surrender. That is buffoonery.
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72 years ago today, the US dropped an atomic bomb on Nagasaki, Japan
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I too watched "The Untold History of The United States". But to assume its 100% accuracy is silly. A mere blockade would have done nothing to encourage surrender. That is buffoonery.
There is no good way to end a war when one side doesn't want it to end (in that case Japan).
At the end, no matter what, bombs or assault, a lot of civilians would have died. No one is defending the bomb, but sometimes war doesn't leave you with any good chances, all are horrible.
And yes, hopefully it will never happen again. The Hiroshima Memorial building is a great place to learn about it because it's not about who was good and bad but to teach that hopefully we will never have to resort to that again.
On top of that there already was a blockade, and it had pretty much cut them off from food completely. The country was starving. The citizens were literally fed pinecones and it did nothing to motivate the leadership.
Well there hasn't been a war of the likes since World War 2. So I think we learned some things.
But yes, now we have reached a point where if we cross the line there is no turning back.
Just put me at ground zero when it happens.
It is not. A blockade of mainland Japan followed by a statu quo would have made them surrender in China and Manchuria in weeks. After that, what? Japanese women and children swimming to Los Angeles in order to suicide there?
The war would have ended here, without humiliation but with pragmatism, without massmurdering civilians with nuclear power.
Japan would have been an unaligned nation in the aftermath and not a USA protectorate. That's it.
What aspect of the blockade would have motivated surrender?
It isn't the same conversation, but it's clearly a related one. I mean we are doing the same thing with discussion in 1945 are we not? I'm not sure why we need to allow a certain amount of time to pass, and then we have to determine how much time needs to pass, to apply certain methods to understanding why people think what they think.
This is the key epistemological situation, and the comparison doesn't quite work. A better one is two people tell me about a car they saw. One of them tells me the car was red. One of them tells me it was green, and that the other person was colorblind. Whether or not the latter was telling the truth, the argument is clearly pertinent to convincing me of the color of the car. None of the facts involved are pertinent to the actual color of the car.
I'm engaging with you in good faith, I'd appreciate it if you reciprocated. Comparing the color of a physical object with our understanding of the past is disingenuous and I think you know that.
It's not that it's easier, it's that it's going to happen because no one in this thread is a Japanese historian and no one seems to actually be deferring to the expert community. Moreover, I'm asserting that what you're calling a logical fallacy isn't that problematic in this situation. The conversation we are having isn't two people simply making rational claims from first order principles, who we are is conceivably pertinent here.
The Japanese people would have starved harder. The leadership that didn't care would have cared slightly more.
IceBringer
Banned
This is nonsense
There were a lot of things unknown about the nuclear bombs until they were fully tested. This testing wasn't complete until some time after World War II ended - just look at how much of a screw up the Bikini Atoll tests were, and they were conducted years after the war.
Nah, the Japanese field commanders didn't think that a Soviet invasion was going to be possible until 1946. The launching points for such an attack were in such remote locations that it should have taken months for the Soviets to prepare and you don't want to launch a multi-month campaign in September or October. Nobody thought that the Red Army would have been ready in August or that the campaign was effectively over in about two weeks.
The most I've come across in regards to the American position on a Soviet attack would be Hasegawa, but I don't entirely agree with his position there. I'm sure that he's correct that the Americans would go all out to stop the Soviets from gaining more influence in the Far East, but the Americans had no spies on the ground and they never had much idea what the Soviets were up to at any stage in the war. American historians didn't even know key details about Bagration and Kursk until the Soviet archives were opened in the '90s, so it's highly unlikely that any details about Vasilevsky's plan would have been known before the fact.
I'm sure that the blockade would have induced a surrender eventually, but Japan was looking at the starvation deaths of something along the lines of a million people a month by 1946. And Downfall was going to happen in November anyways, and that would have been millions more people dead.
Stormhammer
Member
you state this is as if you have undeniable proof of this outcome.
also, i read that article from the new yorker. that was a haunting, important read.
Gunblade47
Neo Member
No, quite frankly the US hasn't used their weapons since that day and it's something to be praised. I'm anti nuclear weapons but in no way am I trying to paint your nation as THE boogeyman in international relations.
As others have stated things aren't as black and white when it comes to war and yet you believe that because I am critical of the US for using those weapons it just means that I see it as enemy #1?
What a silly conclusion to reach.
Hexa
Member
This is false. The bombs were blown up at high altitudes so there was minimum fall out. Allied scientists that swept the area months later recorded minimal radioactive activity. The radioactivity deaths from after the blast were from people in the blast zone when it went off that survived the blast. The allied forces did spread the rumors that the blast zone would be uninhabitable for decades to try to make the bombs look more terrifying though, so that's where that comes from.
KillerMan91
Member
And yet that peace has lasted unlike in the past and huge part of that is nuclear deterrence.
The other person didn't say it was green. They just said it wasn't blue and the only reason they give for why it wasn't was because it had two doors. That's the point I'm making. There is no attempt to argue a different person observed it was green. That's an actual substantive claim that could be discussed and a piece of information relevant to the color debate. Door count is not regardless of how you or anyone else perceive how the discussion will progress or has progressed.
Yes, war is hell. War is also, at times, inevitable and WW2 is perhaps the only real "necessary" war the modern world has ever seen. We'd all love to live in a world where everything is rainbows and all is happy but since the first monkey killed another monkey war has been a horrid truth of human nature.
The thing with the two nukes was that they were shocking. It's why Japan decided to surrender upon seeing them despite having suffered just as many civilian losses from conventional methods already. It's also why, today, we're still debating on whether their use was right or not when every single side on most every single front had been fighting a total war for the better part of half a decade at that point. When people "defend" their use they're not saying "oh it was all fine and dandy and not a bad thing at all" they're saying "it was sadly necessary at the time and there's little reason to put it above all else as some unique tragedy in a war full of tragedies."
You would still be in fear of nuclear weapons even without the 2 bombs dropped on Nagaskai and Hiroshima. Making of the bombs were bound to happen eventually. Most of us would still be here in fear that multiple countries have nuclear arsenals.
Gunblade47
Neo Member
I mean, that is true. Nuclear weapons and the global economy are large deterrents to a large scale war. But if or when things go south this fragile peace will come at a very heavy price.
And in that hypothetical world the US wouldn't be criticized for dropping the bombs I guess. It doesn't magically sweep the fact that those bombs were dropped in this world under the rug though.
Those words aren't mine, those are the words of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, famous japanese-american historian in "Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan" (2005).
And it says Japan would have make peace because of their incapacity to win oversea. And by the fear of a USSR annexion of their northern islands.
An invasion wasn't needed at all. They feared the Soviets a lot more than USA.
But then, what USA would have won if not a total capitulation? Cold war began when USSR crossed the Manchurian border.
Cambodian-Vietnamese War is pretty necessary as well.
I doubt it. The actual attacks on populated cities were necessary to bring home just how scary these weapons are. Tests alone would have never had that effect.
Again that isn't what was happening, my comparison was better. They weren't making some nonsense claim, they were specifically casting doubt on the authority of a claim for a reason that isn't directly related to the object being spoken about but instead the person's understanding of that object. Which is clearly what the propaganda claim is. Your general problem seems to be folding the object of discussion into our discussion of it.
It's been a while and I forgot what that poster specifically said and I don't feel like looking back through the thread to find out so I'll take you at you word. That being said I think is this situation the counter argument in its general sentiment is obvious enough that we can say that even if he said nothing to that effect if he was concerned with arguing against your interpretation then he was probably either supporting A. a more nuanced discussion (unlikely) and/or B. that dropping the bombs was clearly unnecessary. It probably would have been better to be explicit, but I don't think it's that big of an issue if he wasn't.
Because door count is totally not germane to the argument, it's a random aside. Your comparison is really unfair, if not to that poster than at least to me. Regardless of whether or not you like it, our current situation absolutely can be relevant to discussion about the past. This makes sense as you aren't arguing, if you have any sort of epistemological sense, about what happened in some platonic sense, you're arguing that this is the most reasonable, likely, convincing, or what-have-you way to understand something.
He might be wrong that propaganda is relevant in a specific case, you are wrong in asserting that such concerns are never relevant.
I would disagree. That TSAR bomba drop frightens me.
But Hasegawa was talking about it in the context of a Soviet invasion happening first. In which case it's the invasion that triggers a Japanese surrender rather than a blockade.
If the Allies had relied on a pure blockade, Japan probably wouldn't have surrendered until sometime in the Summer of 1946, and that would have meant millions to tens of millions of extra deaths.
Yeah, I said perhaps because I must admit that history is not my forte. I'm interested in it but I rarely seek it out or go into a lot of detail.
So out of that 4 million 1.2 million were really operational.
And again, 290.000 US soldiers killed in battle in the whole war including the fight against a far, far stronger german army.
When the Russians invaded and the second atomic bomb was dropped the council ruling the country still would not agree to the terms of surrender. Again, after Russia invaded. After the second bomb was dropped. The emperor himself had to step in and force the acceptance and was almost killed for it.
If we sat around and waited for the blockade to starve people, how long until that kills just as many people as the bombs? We know Japan was willing to lose civilians to defend the homeland. We know they intended to prolong to conflict to demand better surrender terms. There's little to no reason to think this would have motivated a surrender.
Hasegawa talked in the context of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, not mainland Japan.
And then, that's what i said earlier:
"USSR's entry in the conflict made them surrender. And a mere blockade... Etc".
And everyone jumping on the blockade. Ew.
Hirofumi Hayashi does put forward an argument for a 1945 invasion, however. They weren't completely ignorant of Soviet troop movements and it was suspected that they could invade sometime from September onwards.
A Time-Lapse Map of Every Nuclear Explosion Since 1945 - by Isao Hashimoto
edit: wtf. We were still still doing tests into the early 90s. Western U.S.A. is nothing but cancer.
edit: wtf. We were still still doing tests into the early 90s. Western U.S.A. is nothing but cancer.
Trojita
Rapid Response Threadmaker
The detonation occurred in the air. There wasn't much lingering radiation. This was on purpose. Now a nuclear missile hitting land or a reactor blowing up? You're fucked.
Just listened to an interesting radiolab podcast that revealed to me that when Truman was planning the strike, he wrote in his notepad that he was bombing a military base, and that no civilians, women, or children would be killed.
He didn't quite realize what he had ordered until the death toll and information came the day after Hiroshima. Then the strike happened on Nagasaki 3 days later, and Truman didn't exactly realize that it was happening. There were.plans to drop a 3rd nuke, but Truman immediately told them to stop and not do anything without his direct order. That's what started the push towards the president having complete control over the nukes.
He didn't quite realize what he had ordered until the death toll and information came the day after Hiroshima. Then the strike happened on Nagasaki 3 days later, and Truman didn't exactly realize that it was happening. There were.plans to drop a 3rd nuke, but Truman immediately told them to stop and not do anything without his direct order. That's what started the push towards the president having complete control over the nukes.
How can any particular motivation for holding a position ever impact the validity of that position? That reasoning only works in the backward direction. "Position A was wrong, and he held it because of B" is fine. "He holds position A because of B, therefore A is wrong" makes no logical sense.
The Bikini Atoll nuclear tests will always sicken me due to what it did to those poor people. Human rats, there can never be any justification for that.
teruterubozu
Member
I don't think it's so simple. There's definitely a growing contingent of nationalism growing in Japan with very vocal politicians.
1) A nuclear bomb directly on one city didn't get an immediate unconditional surrender.
2) A months-long firebombing campaign of Tokyo itself killing more than the nuclear bomb did also didn't get a surrender.
How do you suppose one 'off the coast' with no direct casualties would have scared the Japanese government? And how long would you be willing to wait for a definite response while millions still suffered under Imperial Japan oppression in mainland Asia?
A good example of this is Whiggery, or certain strains of Marxism. Again part of your issue is you're trying to push a specific methodology that works well, pace post-modernists, for rationalism argued from first ordered principles onto history, where that methodology simply does not fit epistemologically.
You're right he should have made a positive argument, given the situation though I think most of us know what the positive argument would be. It would probably be about as convincing as most of the arguments in this thread, which is to say about as convincing as a baseless assertion based on parroting the received narrative.
Regardless that doesn't say anything about his propaganda claim. It just means he didn't make a very convincing self-contained argument in favor of his view, whatever it is. It certainly doesn't say anything about the value of such argumentative moves in general.
Hasegawa was talking about the importance of the USSR as a neutral third party with whom Japan could negotiate with to try to avoid an unconditional surrender. The reason Japan would surrender upon a Soviet invasion was because that neutral party would now be an enemy and there were no longer any prospects of anything other than utter capitulation. A blockade would be a contributing factor to a surrender, but it would have never been the main cause, at least not in 1945.
It was suspected, and rejected by the field commanders in Manchuria. A September attack doesn't make any sense because nobody wants to campaign in Manchuria during the winter and that's how long the attack should have dragged out. Moreover, the invasion of Manchuria was perhaps the most successful surprise attack in military history, and that could not happen if the defenders had the proper preparations.
The motivations for adopting those positions are not what make them poor frameworks.
A baseless assertion can be addressed. You can ask for support or counter it with a different assertion. I don't understand why or how your perception of the quality of discourse can somehow justify the use of logical fallacies.
Just ask the ultimate question then. Why making them surrender is important when they can't harm you no more? Let them come to end this.
Actually, they came. When USSR declared war and the two nuclear bombings happened. But what made them change their "Mokusatsu" stance? If you understand it better than translator back in the day, i mean.
67 Japan cities were conventionally bombed to ashes before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Do you really think two more cities made them come to peace? They didn't care about their people. They cared about their name and soul.
This was all a race between Allies and USSR. All points to it. And USA nuclear bombings while USSR storms through Manchuria made them surrender. The bombings made them talk to USA before USSR.
They would have surrendered nevertheless. But not the way USA wanted them to.
Fair points. I'll still hold to the revisionist claim regarding the surprise invasion being the primary motivating factor behind the surrender. It seems like a more convincing argument. What are your thoughts on Gar Alperovitz?
SurrenderDorothy
Banned
That's heartless.
I would've pushed the button if it meant the war will end, but not feeling bad about it? Decimating thousands is a heavy thing, man.
You aren't understanding. There are many very convincing historical arguments made within a Whiggish or Marxist framework. For instance the Marxist and Whiggish understandings of 1688 was quite popular for quite some time, not just because these intellectual fashions were in vouge, but also because they were so established that they were capable of putting out narratives with a high degree of sophistication within their perimeters. It is absolutely pertinent when looking at such arguments now that they people writing them were Whiggish or Marxist, even if such information does not come out in the argument directly.
Honestly, what you're doing is denying that bias is a relevant thing to be aware of. I see where you're coming from, but it's ultimately a very shallow way of looking at the past based on a methodology that simply doesn't fit.
Again, you keep moving historical discussion from being talking about the past to being the past itself. We aren't getting at the dinge an sich here. Science has a far better claim to being able to do that, and even it clearly falls far short of actually doing that.
Kinda sorta, all you can do is posit a better understanding by appealing to specific sources, either primary or secondary which has happened once in this thread and even then it was popular history, or demonstrate that the baseless assertion is internally inconsistent. Most claims about the past aren't really demonstrably wrong, they are demonstrably weak.
Yes, and if we were Japanese historians we could do this in a meaningful way. But we aren't so the best we could do is point to that expert community. Which frankly should be the end of our discussion. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that no one in this thread has the ability to meaningfully create new arguments on this topic. I doubt anyone has done archival work on the subject, and synthesizing secondary arguments is best done in the form of short summaries coupled with a reference to that secondary source. Which is to say by pointing towards the expert community involved here.
Because I'm asserting that what you are calling a logical fallacy isn't problematic in this situation. I'm also a big fan of appealing to authority, in the form of expert communities who society gives privileged access to epistemological claims within their field. I'm sure you'd also call this a fallacy, while I think this is the only way we can meaningfully deal with complex matters in the modern world.
It didn't really change the stance of the council. They still wanted to wait it out and push for better terms. It changed the emperor's stance, who overruled the council and took action.
Any discussion about saving lives needs to consider the cost of waiting for them to surrender because of some other reason. Do allied military operations continue? Of course. Does Japan stay in Manchuria? Yup. Does Russia continue its way through Manchuria? Yes again. Japanese civilians also continue to run out of food and other supplies. How many casualties does each additional day represent? Do they take an extra month? Three?
You're contradicting yourself in the same sentence. Is there consensus, or is it unclear?
That's not a contradiction at all unless you very narrowly define consensus as a simple majority thinking something. Even if 80% of historians agree that it wasn't necessary as long as they agreed that the opposing arguments had weight and merited serious consideration there wouldn't be consensus. Not to mention that's ignoring the fact that people who don't think it was necessary don't necessarily have the same view about why it was unnecessary in the first place or the meaning of unnecessary.
Generally in history we use consensus to mean a view that's generally accepted to the point where disagreement is considered fringe.
Saying a person who had this worldview believed A, and therefore A is wrong, is bad reasoning. It just is. The relationship between position A and that worldview might be a wonderful discussion worth having but not in relation to a determination of validity.
An appeal to authority isn't about using bits of information from experts to support an argument, but about offering the credentials of the source as the only support of validity for that piece of information and as a shield against all criticism. If that were an acceptable form of argument we wouldn't need footnotes and citations and primary source availability. Experts articulate their reasoning and offer support. They don't possess a magical ability to conjure conclusions behind a curtain that they afterwards reveal to us. We can all assess their reasoning. If it's flawed, their degree doesn't make it not flawed.