Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

The atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima, quickly followed by the bombing of Nagasaki (on 6 and 9 August 1945, respectively) established that the Greek myth of "opening Pandora's box" had real-life consequences."...and the genie can't be stuffed back in the bottle." - Lawrence Johnston, "Little Man" developer 
With a combined death toll of at least 200,000,The Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki: Total Casualties, Yale the attacks marked the end of World War II with the total surrender of Imperial Japan, the culmination of the Manhattan Project, and doomed human civilization to over 40 70 years of threatening apocalypse for strategic gain. 
==But why?==
=== The Military Necessity Argument ===
The ethical justifications of nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki remain in considerable debate. Proponents, including former President Harry Truman (who never recanted his decision to drop the bombs), maintain that it was a necessary measure to prevent a costly invasion of Japan, with casualties expected to rise into the millions. (Double the landing force of Normandy and 42 aircraft carriers. Yes, you heard that correctly.) However, opponents consider it state terrorism (or genocidal) and question its military necessity as Soviet forces were already cornering Manchuria from the north and the war in Europe was over. 
The idea of the fanatical Japanese warrior-state that would fight to the bitter end, with images of school children and housewives using bamboo spears to defend the God-Emperor was often invoked and did have some basis in reality. American, Australian and other allied forces had seen that Japanese troops would often die in futile charges or commit ritual suicide rather than surrender. At the Japan used child soldiers, forced the civilian population into makeshift military units, and instructed them to kill themselves rather than surrender. Of the five Japanese commanders at Okinawa, only one was captured alive. The a war memorial on Okinawa, shows that almost 80,000 Japanese soldiers died there, along with almost 150,000 civilians. Only 7,000 Japanese soldiers were taken as prisoners of war, and on the night of August 14th, 1945 (eight days after the bombing of Hiroshima and 5 days after the bombing of Nagasaki) a cabal of Japanese military officers attempted to overthrow the emperor and prevent the surrender in what is known as the 
A study performed by physicist William Shockley for the staff of Secretary of War Henry Stimson estimated that the invasion of Japan would have cost 1.7-4 million American casualties, including 400,000-800,000 fatalities, and 5-10 million Japanese deaths. The estimates are twice the number of American deaths in Europe, North Africa, and the Pacific theater."The Nuking of Japan was a Tactical and Moral Imparative", Forbes The U.S. planned to drop another bomb a few days after the second, followed by a total of 12 additional atomic bombs. TheDailyBeast
 leader of the Japanese agreed with the atomic bombings as a military necessity. During a conversation with Air Force general the man who piloted the Enola Gay during the actual bombing, he said:
Of course, this only applies if you were actually going to launch a ground invasion. But more on that later.
=== On the other hand... ===
University of Chicago political scientist has suggested that if the U.S. was willing to budge just a little on some issues (not demanding total surrender from the Japanese, letting the Emperor go on pretending to be a living god), a settlement could have been reached before the bombings. 
This opinion is strongly supported by internal Japanese government messages intercepted by the allies at the time. Archived copies of a lengthy and highly detailed telegram correspondence between Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs and Japanese Ambassador to the Soviet Union demonstrate this. In telegram #994 dispatched from Tōgō to Satō on July 25th, 1945 Tōgō states:
 
The situation was this: Japan refused to surrender unconditionally, but the allies wouldn't accept anything less. Thus the United States had a choice; They could either launch a ground invasion (codenamed ), which would have caused even more casualties on both sides, or continue the existing naval blockade and bombing raids until the surrender finally happened. Truman confirms this state of affairs with the following entry in his diary:
Furthermore, according to the Summary Report of The 
Note that the summary report specifies that this consultation was in June 1945 and the Trinity test didn't take place until the middle of July 1945. So when they said this, they didn't know atomic bombs would become available.
So dropping the atomic bomb was not the only alternative to a ground invasion. Consequently, any narrative to the effect that the atomic bombs were necessary to save American lives is false.
The Japanese did have a plan to resist this possible invasion called Operation Ketsugo.Operation Ketsugō It called for the "Glorious Death of One Hundred Million" Japanese citizens in defense of the Emperor. However, since the US had already enacted a massive sea blockade"Japans Nightmare - Mine Blockade" a ground invasion was unnecessary and therefore definitely not guaranteed to happen.
Even some the highest ranking members of the American military were firmly against it. Who disagreed with the atomic bombing?, University of Colorado Dwight D. Eisenhower himself said the following:
Fleet Admiral America's most senior military officer during WWII, didn't mince words wither.
And just to put this point firmly to bed, later on in the Summary Report, the US Government admits that not only was a ground invasion completely unnecessary, so was the atomic bomb.
But that's not to say the bombs accomplished nothing at all. They gave us a that lasted 45 years.
===Racism===
Bomb apologists often point out that Germany surrendered in early May 1945, before the bomb was ready. But Manhattan Project director General Leslie R. Groves asserted that Japan was always supposed to have been the target of the bombs, even long before Germany's surrender.“Always” the target?: While U.S. bomb scientists were racing against Germany, military planners were looking toward the Pacific, Arjun Makhijani, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, v. 51, no. 3 (May/June 1995): pp. 23-27. 
In a hypothetical scenario where Germany got Nuked and Japan didn't, one could argue that the decision of where to drop the bomb was not strongly influenced by racism. In another scenario where both countries get nuked, the lack of racism involved in nuking Germany does not mean that nuking Japan wasn't racist. Racism could have been, and likely was, just one of many contributing factors in the decision.
And Truman himself had some less than egalitarian views on the enemy, as expressed in a written response to a telegram from Senator Note that the letter is dated August 9th, the same day Nagasaki was bombed, and three days after Hiroshima was bombed.
The telegram the letter refers to is quite a doozy.https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/research-files/telegram-richard-russell-harry-s-truman In it, Sen. Russell outright insists on nuking Japan until they beg for unconditional surrender. Truman's response, racism and all, is downright reasonable by comparison.
=== Because, Russia ===
In February, 1945 US president Franklin D. Roosevelt represented the United States at , where the Soviet Union agreed to declare war on Japan. Also present as a member of the US delegation was then But Russia didn't agree to help for free. The concessions given to Russia for their cooperation can be found in the text of the "PROTOCOL OF PROCEEDINGS OF CRIMEA CONFERENCE".
However, Roosevelt died just two months later on April 12th leaving Harry Truman in office. Truman replaced Stettinius with on July 3rd, because he felt Stettinius was soft on communism, and that too many concessions were made to the Soviet Union at Yalta. Truman wanted to limit or prevent Russian involvement in post-war Japan, unlike the situation they now had in Germany.
From The Unites States article on Atomic Diplomacy:
To sum up: Roosevelt thought cooperating with the Russians to end the war was fine, and made a deal to that effect. Then he unexpectedly died and was replaced by Truman. Truman didn't like the deal with Russia, so he used the bomb in an attempt to force Japan to surrender quickly before Russia could get their foot in the door.
== What finally got the job done? ==
So what finally did convince Japan to surrender? The U.S. told them they could keep the emperor. The following is an extract from a diplomatic note written by Byrnes, dated August 11th, 1945, clarifying the terms of surrender offered to the government of Japan. Archived (yet again) by the United States Office of the Historian.
Japan accepted this offer and four days later on August 15th.
That's right. We nuked them twice and they still didn't tap out. We told them the could keep their monarch as a figurehead, and they folded right up. Go figure.
This shouldn't have come as a surprise to anybody for one fairly obvious reason: Fascist dictatorships do not give a fuck how many of their people you kill. 
Case in point, the killed more people than either of the atomic bombs and that didn't make Japan surrender. As far as the Japanese supreme council was concerned Hiroshima and Nagasaki were just two more cities that got burned. They (the council) didn't get nuked, that happened to a bunch of peasants they didn't give a shit about. So why should they care?
But it's likely that none of this mattered very much (at the time) to those who suffered under Japanese colonialism and imperialism, like the people of China and Korea, who merely wanted to be free from the oppression of a fascist, murderous Imperial invader. Indeed, many Chinese and Korean people view the U.S. decision on Hiroshima and Nagasaki as justifiable.
==The perspective of thinking about this event in post-war Japan==
Japan's right-wingers want the U.S. to apologize for this.
Japan's ultra-rightists claim that Japan was a victim of World War II. On the other hand, they also deny the killings, biopsies and brutal sex crimes they committed in other countries. In particular, far-right groups, including Nippon Kaigi, support the distorted view of history as a "victim of World War II" because Japan was damaged by the atomic bomb and promote it globally, to erase that they were allies with Nazis and fascists at the time and that they were serious war crimes perpetrators.The Economist of Britain on 5 January 2013. Cited in: William L. Brooks (2013), Will history again trip up Prime Minister Shinzo Abe? The Asahi Shimbun, 7 May 2013 This historical revisionism of Japanese nationalists has made Koreans and Chinese, the biggest victims of , positively aware of the atomic bomb attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Japanese liberals and leftists tend to oppose nuclear power, which is also the impact of the trauma of radiation damage in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
==Korean atomic bombing victims==
Except for the Japanese, the ethnic groups most affected in Hiroshima and Nagasaki are Koreans. Many of them were brought in by Imperial Japan and . The Japanese government denies that Koreans were subjected to "forced labor" by Imperial Japan."S. Korea and Japan debate comments about being "forced to work"". The Hankyoreh. July 7, 2015. Retrieved 2015-09-13.Therefore, the Japanese government refused to compensate and fought a in 2018 when a Korean court demanded compensation. Many Koreans are angry that, unlike Germany's treatment of the Holocaust victims and its sufficient apology and compensation to the victims in Israel, Japan does not take such an attitude toward Korea. (Japan is notorious for its historical revisionism of past fascist war crimes.) As many as 100,000 Koreans were exposed to radiation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, 50,000 of whom died.원폭 피해자(原爆 被害者, Korean atomic bombing victims) - 한국민족문화대백과사전 (Encyclopedia of Korean Culture).
Complicating this issue is the nationalist sentiment-based conflict between Japanese conservatives and South Korean liberals. South Korean liberals and anti-colonial Korean nationalists tend to defend the United States rather than Korean victims, as they see sympathy for Hiroshima and Nagasaki as part of right-wing Japanese nationalists' historical revisionist and denial of Japanese war crimes agenda. This puts anti-colonial anti-Japanese nationalism ahead of sympathy for Korean victims. In particular, many Korean nationalitsts think that Japanese nationalists sympathy for Hiroshima is no different from Neo-Nazi's sympathy for the Bombing of Dresden, because Japanese ultra-nationalists actually use Hiroshima to deny Japanese war crimes during World War II. In 2023, there was considerable controversy in South Korea when South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol visited the memorial stone for Korean victims in Hiroshima and paid tribute with Japanese Prime Minister . All previous South Korean governments before Yoon Suk Yeol have turned a blind eye to Korean victims in Hiroshima and Nagasaki to oppose Japanese nationalism and to defend U.S. action against Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yoon apologizes to Korean atomic bombing victims in Japan - JoongAng Dally (May 19, 2023). "President Yoon Suk Yeol met with a group of Korean victims of the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima and apologized that Korea was not with them through their suffering during a visit to Japan on Friday for the Group of Seven (G7) summit." Ironically, Yoon Suk Yeol is a far-right ultra-conservative politician who supports anti-Chinese racism and anti-feminism."Is Yoon Suk-yeol the South Korean Trump?". The Korea Herald (2 March 2022).
Anti-Japanese sentiment in South Korea is more pronounced among liberals and leftists, and the conservatives are relatively pro-Japanese. This is related to the anti-colonialist/anti-imperialist ideology of the SK political left against Japan. The relative pro-Japanese of the right wing of South Korea is a foreign policy taken to maintain friendly relations with the United States. The U.S. government is not very interested in South Korea's 'anti-colonial' or 'maintaining an anti-Japanese American/Korean nationalist attitude toward Hiroshima' political agenda, and wants South Korea and Japan to cooperate with each other to keep China in check.The Foreign Policy Outlook of South Korean Progressives: Part II KEI (2012-02-22). "This worldview, in turn, informed South Korean liberals’ foreign policy instincts. Because they understand Korean history as a century of suffering under external imposition – first by Imperial Japan, then by the Cold War hegemons who sponsored Korea’s dictators – the liberals would aspire for independence, autonomy, and self-determination. This aspiration often takes the form of nationalism, anti-colonialism and skepticism toward international entanglement, which makes South Korean liberals distinctive from most of the center-left in post-industrial societies. Roughly speaking, in most countries with high standards of living (which usually are former colonizers), the right-wing tends to subscribe more to the nationalistic ideology while the left is more internationalist. In South Korea, a former colony, this dynamic is often reversed.
==Possible silver lining==
Some contend that a positive side effect of the bombing was that it showed the world the true horrors of a nuclear attack, and that the Cold War didn't go nuclear because leaders on both sides saw that nuclear weapons did more than cause massive explosions.
==Lingering horror==
Japan's diagnoses of leukemia increased significantly in the wake of the bombings.Leukaemia in Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors from 1945 through 1959, WHO This link between radiation and cancer gave birth to modern radiophobia.
Incredibly, managed to survive both explosions. He lived to the age of 93 before dying of (what else?) cancer, which affected multiple parts of his body.
There are still roughly 250,000 survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but despite their noticeably higher rates of cancer, the Japanese government only officially recognizes less than one percent as having A-bomb Disease. Many professionals allege that the real difficulty in meeting the legal criteria is that the Japanese government doesn't want to pay everyone the monthly 140,000 yen special medical allowance required for any citizen diagnosed with A-bomb disease. http://www.hankaku-j.org/data/jalana/002_english.html 
==See also==
*Historian's fallacy - In hindsight, this was obviously a bad idea.
==External links==
* The Decision to Use the Bomb: A Consensus View?, Nuclear Secrecy
* - Scholars have different opinions on whether the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified or unfair.
* Dropping the Bomb: Hiroshima & Nagasaki - Shaun
==Notes==
==References==
Category:Japan
Category:Asian history
Category:Crimes against humanity
Category:Japanese war crimes denial
Category:Racism
Category:Nationalism in Japan
Category:World War II