‘US government documents admit that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not necessary to end WWII. Japan was on the verge of surrendering. The nuclear attack was the first strike in Washington’s Cold War on the Soviet Union. Ben Norton reviews the historical record.’
Your description of the conditions is correct but your conclusion is a non-sequitur. It does not follow logically that the only or best option to stop those atrocities was to mass murder civilians. Despite what the propaganda about the bombings that has since been inculcated into the western public claims, they were not in fact necessary for compelling Japan’s surrender. There were already internal disputes about this in the Japanese leadership for some time, but after their decisive defeat in Manchuria at the hands of the Red Army the decision to surrender as soon as possible became pretty much unanimous. Every day that went by was another day that the Soviets took more territory and came closer and closer - through the Kurils - to the Japanese home islands. The Japanese imperialists knew just as well as the Nazis that they stood a much better chance of avoiding punishment for their crimes (and some of them even being allowed to retain some power in the post war state) if they surrendered to the US rather than the USSR. Moreover we now know that the US leaders knew this. Their primary motivations were to have a live weapons test and to intimidate the Soviet Union.
and to deny the USSR their due in treaty by claiming that they didn’t help defeat Japan/ preventing them from doing another gosh darn destroying Nazi Germany and hogging more credit
you probably know this but for the sake of clarity, the atomic bombs were dropped on August 6th, and a few days later on the 9th. Soviets invaded on the 7th. their plans for Hokkaido were for the 24th, and cancelled by the surrender.
post war assessments make clear that soviets’ comprehensive destruction of the Kwantung army was perceived by parts of the japanese and us governments as sufficient on its own to force the surrender, but your comment sort of reads like the americans dropped the bombs after the soviet’s success to force the japanese to surrender to them instead, which is chronologically unsound.
You say there were ‘options,’ yet somehow managed to avoid actually naming them.
What would you tell the Koreans/Chinese/Burmese whose families died while the negotiations stretched out?
And what of the Japanese civilians? Are their lives automatically forfeit because they had the gall to be born in the bad guy country?
Do not justify atrocities with other atrocities. And do not ignore the bulk of another person’s argument to pretend they had no argument. You just look like an idiot when you do that.
What of the Japanese civilians?
You haven’t given me one word about why their lives were more valuable than the enslaved peoples.
Well this is some inverted reasoning. The bombs didn’t end the war quicker and the US military didn’t think that they would. It was pointless cruelty to civilians that saved no one, for the sake of intimidating the USSR.
And if we follow this logic, then every (white) inhabitant of the US deserves to have every single atom of their bodies blasted out into interstellar space at the speed of light for their country’s past and present crimes.
You’re being deliberately obtuse, take your concern trolling elsewhere.
Not much since there’d be quite few of them. Japan would be on the retreat at that point and would have very limited capacity to carry out further atrocities.
What would you tell people that lost their families in the Korean war to support the atomic bombs, since Japan surrendering to the US instead of the USSR all but guaranteed that war?
Japan already knew they had lost and were trying to surrender at that point.
“A limited capacity.” Or, they might have decided that if they were going to lose, they would take as many people as they could with them.
Read up on biological warfare Unit 731 and tell me that there was no chance they’d have killed as many people as they could.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
Fascists are often cowards, I’m not saying they wouldn;t callously kill people during their retreat, rather that atrocities take planning and coordination, ergo time, time they wouldn’t have if they wanted to flee and they would have,
If your logic held up there’d be little stopping them from committing these light-speed atrocoties between the second bomb and the surrender.
Plus, if they really wanted to go out in a blaze-of-glory Goetterdaemmerung situation, why would the atomic bombs have made any difference whatsoever? The argument seems to be “the Japanese government wanted to kill Japanese civilians, and the only way we Americans could stop them was by… killing Japanese civilians.”
See also: Iraq, Afghanistan, Vietnam, Korea etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731#Surrender_and_immunity
Curious.
Interesting.
It just keeps going.
So glad US nuked civilians so they could have sole occupation of Japan.
I didn’t name the option because it was implied. The option was: don’t use the nuclear bombs. Everything else stays the same. The Japanese would have still surrendered within the same timeframe. There would have been no stretched out negotiations for precisely the reason i laid out, namely that every day that they did not surrender their position wrt the Soviet Union became worse and worse. And there is no evidence to suggest that the bombing of civilians, either in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or in the firebombing of Tokyo and other cities, did anything whatsoever to bring about the unconditional surrender any faster.
Murdering civilians does not compel fascist regimes to surrender because - newsflash! - fascists don’t value human life. The bombings of civilians in Germany by the western allies also had no effect on the timing of the Nazi defeat, and neither did the same actions in Japan. And in fact this does not just apply to fascist states, killing civilians is simply not an effective strategy in war in general. The Nazis didn’t achieve anything with their bombing raids on London, they would have been better off had they kept focusing on military targets. Killing civilians in the erroneous belief that this will intimidate your enemy into surrender is called terrorism, and moral judgements aside it is simply a fact that that is a counterproductive strategy.
Nowadays the Kiev regime are also under the similar delusion that if they just hit enough civilian targets in Russia this will somehow destabilize Russia or scare Putin into backing off. It is not working, and entirely unsurprisingly is having the exact opposite effect.
Japan had been trying to surrender for months before the bombs were dropped. the US could have simply accepted the terms and executed the military leaders. instead they dropped the bombs, accepted the terms, and inducted the worst war criminals into the US military.