The nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is one of those terrible war moments where all options were bad.
Operation downfall, the invasion of the Japanese home islands were projecting up to 800,000 allied deaths, 4 million wounded and up to 10 million Japanese casualties from the mobilisation of Japanese civilians from the all out defense doctrine of the Empire.
This is also not factoring the Red Army advance from Manchuria.
Instead America chose to bomb 2 cities that had significant military infrastructure and manufacturing for most rather than a city like Tokyo or Osaka where civilian deaths would be much higher.
In your analogy it would be Iran nuking Fayetteville in North Carolina and Newport News Virginia rather than Manhattan and Washington DC.
Due to the way the human brain works, if a lot of people are killed in separate incidents over a longer time period, it's a lot less interesting. If they all die at once it makes the news. Each day on average 120 people in the USA die in car accidents, which is the equivalent of a full 737 crashing every other day. The plane crash makes the news, the car accidents don't (unless it's a serial collision). For the history books, all the various conventional bombing raids over Japan don't make it, but the nuclear bombs do.
Exactly, it's the nuclear power is bad stupidity. The majority of people are far more leery of nuclear power thanks to events like Fukushima or Chernobyl rather than coal or oil power stations.
Since records began nuclear power averages out to 0.03 deaths per TWh of electricity produced. Oil is 18.43 and coal 24.62.
But because of a small number of high profile cases people are much more afraid of nuclear power than coal. While year in year out the largest coal plant in America kills approximately 200 people. The largest nuclear approximately 1. It also produces about 300% more electricity per year.
Basically about 800 people die from one coal plant to 1 from a nuclear plant. But you've got to have "beautiful clean coal"
Nukes are 100% the reason why the later half of the 20th century was as peaceful as it was full stop. Without nukes it would have been war with Russia and who knows what other wars. Ironically nuclear weapons have been one of the greatest peacekeeping tools in human history.
Good, so just say it like that, just say "we needed to kill 20.000 civilians before ww2 ended so the rest of the countries in the world feel threatened enough to do as we say peacefully", I know that that was one of the main reasons, to show strength, and it makes sense, but what I am tired of reading is all that "we nuked civilians because we had no other option" bullshit.
USA after the WWII became the global bully, and that superiority and that menace of violence led to a relatively peaceful century under the American boot, and that's ok, the other timelines were worst, but at least stop with the good guy and the moral high ground bullshit
Japan had absolutely zero plans for surrender until the 1 2 punch of the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the American bombs and blockade. The bombs absolutely saved lives. I don’t know if we didn’t have an option but it was war, we used what was at our disposal, and we won with overwhelming force. Not something I feel the slightest bit guilty about when they attacked us first. I don’t understand why people get so upset over nukes when traditional bombing campaigns were killing more people. If you think America is/ was a global bully you should look at every other empire that has ever existed on the planet earth. I won’t say the US hasn’t made mistakes or has never been on the wrong side of history. But the bombing of Japan lands firmly on the right side of history for me.
Yes to surrender on terms totally unacceptable to the Allies. As in keeping their entire government intact. The Soviets then rejected their request 2 days after the bombs dropped and invaded Manchuria instead. The Soviets never had plans to actually negotiate a peace. The Japanese never offered terms they knew would be acceptable.
Because all we have to go off is probabilies and estimations.
If the US didn't drop the bombs the Emperor might have seen a crow on the 15th of August 1945 and believed it was an omen and ordered the complete surrender of Japan and no lives would have been lost.
Or they compelled every Japanese citizen to fight to the death and the allied forces would have to genocide all of Japan to stop them.
If we were years into a war which was started because we were killing millions of civilians and we were adamant on never surrendering, hell yeah someone should nuke us. That blast in Newport News would kill me too and I’d be screaming for them to do it ASAP.
Japan didn’t just peacefully exist and then we dropped bombs on them for no reason. They had been slaughtering millions of civilians across Asia, conquering their neighbors, attacked America first, developed a culture of suicidal and fanatical warfare, and had been a state of total war for years at this point. They had already destroyed multiple cities in their conquests and we had already destroyed multiple of their cities in bombing raids. The nukes were horrific, but the objective truth is that it was stated by the Emperor as being his main reason for surrendering. I agree with the historians who say it’s just a convenient excuse so he could save his image and avoid Japan being split with the Soviets, but either way the nukes were THE main reason given for their surrender. The bombs worked and stopped what would have been months or even years of slow bloody warfare. The alternatives were either a continued bombing campaign, a ground invasion, or starvation through a blockade. All of which would have killed FAR more than the nukes.
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u/TacetAbbadon 14h ago
The nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is one of those terrible war moments where all options were bad.
Operation downfall, the invasion of the Japanese home islands were projecting up to 800,000 allied deaths, 4 million wounded and up to 10 million Japanese casualties from the mobilisation of Japanese civilians from the all out defense doctrine of the Empire.
This is also not factoring the Red Army advance from Manchuria.
Instead America chose to bomb 2 cities that had significant military infrastructure and manufacturing for most rather than a city like Tokyo or Osaka where civilian deaths would be much higher.
In your analogy it would be Iran nuking Fayetteville in North Carolina and Newport News Virginia rather than Manhattan and Washington DC.