This book is an incredibly good read: "'The Making of the Atomic Bomb' is a history book written by the American journalist and historian Richard Rhodes, first published by Simon & Schuster in 1987. The book won multiple awards, including Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction. The narrative covers people and events from early 20th century discoveries leading to the science of nuclear fission, through the Manhattan Project and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki."
Possibly the best book that I have ever read. It deals with many of the issues raised in the comments here, and with politics, industrial development, economics, military capabilities, and the history of modern physics.
Rhodes also wrote "'Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb', which told the story of the atomic espionage during World War II, the debates over whether the hydrogen bomb ought to be produced, and the eventual creation of the bomb and its consequences for the arms race." Also impeccable
Second this. It's currently available free on the RSS feed in every podcast directory. The whole back catalog can also be purchased, and IMHO it's well worth buying. I bought it a couple years back and have been very happy with it. I think it's like $80, but you get countless hours of good history from a master storyteller.
His series on World War I (aka The Great War) called "Blueprint For Armageddon" was one of the most interesting and captivating of any podcasts or audiobooks I've ever listened to.
When I was younger the older folks would talk so highly about the days of theater radio, when actors and storytellers would tell audio-only stories. I used to wonder how that could possibly compete with video. After listening to Hardcore History, I get it now. There's something really powerful about listening to a natural storyteller lay things out, and Dan Carlin is a master of the craft. If you're new to him, the last few years of shows are always freely available through the RSS feed that's in every podcast directory.
I have heard that Carlin's historiography isn't great... but I will fully agree that the man is a master storyteller and does wonders for making insanely complex topics comprehensible. Ghosts of the Ostfront was the one that sold me on him.
If he's not dead-on, all the time, well, I can read more later and be corrected.
I had no idea you could just buy his old episodes. May have to go buy them now.
Hard disagree that it is inherently "mean" to pirate a book regardless of its status. If you can afford to support someone you should, but IMO we should value most of all unrestricted access to knowledge without shame.
Also this book first came out in 1986. One hopes the author is still not dependent on its sales.
Yep. Personally I’m generally in favour of copyright as it was originally drafted: only valid for 7 years, with an optional extension to 14.
I’m all for creative people making a living from their work, but 40 years copyright is too long. To say nothing of the absurd rules today of 70 years after the death of the author or whatever it is.
My example is Disney's 1959 Sleeping Beauty. Had today's copyright regime been in force, Tchaikovsky's 1890 ballet would have still been under copyright, so Disney couldn't have made it.
Also a lot of history books were funded by government money or NGOs. Which is understandable considering that it may very well take years of research to write one.
I disagree that purchasing the book is automatically the “right” thing to do. If someone cannot afford the book, it is my view that society should not expect them to pay. I believe that this view towards knowledge will lead to a wiser society, and we deviate from that path at our peril.
> IMO we should value most of all unrestricted access to knowledge
This is not "unrestricted access to knowledge". This is a creative work produced by a creative under the assumption that their work would be paid for.
You don't have the right to take someone else's work without compensating them on their terms. That's theft.
Even worse, it's unnecessary theft. You're not advocating for someone pirating a book on exercise so someone can get in shape and extend their life - you're advocating for pirating a book, cheating the author out of revenue, for entertainment alone. People are not going to die because they couldn't get their hands on a copy of "Dark Sun."
And, even if the book was actual utility - the contents for the majority of actually useful books are already made freely available online in the form of research papers, websites, public domain books, or Creative Commons licensed content like LibreTexts or OpenStax. "unrestricted access to knowledge" is effectively already here - you're just being entitled to other people's work, and that is truly shameful.
Books, especially digital copies, are not property in the same way that a house is property. If someone could download a duplicate of my house and live in it without having any impact on my own house, that would be great.
We invented the idea that information is property, and I think restricting access to knowledge via copyright is a net harm to society. Authors need to survive, but IMO we should seek solutions that provide for authors while also allowing unrestricted access. We have seen for well over a decade now that "pay what you can" schemes to fund music and books can work very well. There are three billion people on this planet with an opportunity to gain internet access in the next 50 years. Should we paywall every book written in the last 150 years to benefit publishers? Or make a free public library of every book available to benefit humankind? This is the question we face, and I know what my view on it is.
We also invented the idea that a house is property. That’s not some fundamental law of physics. Some people even think that restricting access to your house is a net harm to society. Perhaps you should experiment with a “pay what you want” scheme for your spare bedroom.
Or, a "pay what you want" system for your employer.
I've never met a single IP pirate (thief) who is willing to reciprocate and let other people take their work (i.e. their labor to their employer) for free.
In fact, the people who are the most vocal about piracy are also those who are most vocal about getting their employer to give them as much money and benefits as possible.
Published works, not "all information". It's up to society to decide if we want to prioritize publishers or humanity. I don't believe our restrictive legal regime will persist around the world in perpetuity. It is too harmful to humanity, and someone will break ranks with "harmonization" even if the USA does not.
Open source is something different. Of course, if you're hoping to confiscate Oracle or Mathematica source by force of law, that IS theft. If you're creating new bodies of code, or even encouraging proprietary code owners to open-source their stuff, I think that's great.
> Books, especially digital copies, are not property in the same way that a house is property.
Yes, this is why the concept of IP/copyright was invented in the first place. And, as people familiar with the copyright system know, the "property" in "intellectual property" does not mean the same thing as for physical property, and that the reason for its invention was not to give people "ownership" over/"property" of information (that's slang that is inaccurate but useful, assuming that the hearer is informed enough to tell the difference), but to give them a time-limited monopoly over the duplication (the "copy" in "copyright") so that they can make a profit proportional to the number of people who have enjoyed their work, before it passes into the public domain to enrich the cultural commons (which is also explicitly part of the copyright system since its conception).
The reasoning for this is because the cost of duplicating IP approaches zero, so some economic system needs to exist that allows people to make money off of IP, and...
> We have seen for well over a decade now that "pay what you can" schemes to fund music and books can work very well
This is disingenuous and wildly misinformed at best, and flat-out intentionally deceptive at worst. No, "pay what you can" schemes do not work very well. They constitute a tiny fraction of the economy, with a corresponding tiny fraction of people who can actually make a living off of them, because they simply do not scale - in addition to being fundamentally unfair for obvious reasons. The vast majority of people who sell IP do not use these schemes. They do not work, except under specific circumstances, for a very small number of people, and absolutely do not scale to anywhere close to the economy. Anyone with even a small amount of internet exposure knows that systems like this are highly uncommon and very rarely provide for the creator's financial needs.
> Should we paywall every book written in the last 150 years to benefit publishers?
Nobody in this thread has suggested this. This is a ridiculous strawman.
> Or make a free public library of every book available to benefit humankind?
...and this is a ridiculous false dichotomy.
> restricting access to knowledge via copyright is a net harm to society
Beyond a large number of people disagreeing with this as an opinion, the majority of available empirical evidence points to this being objectively incorrect. Society has been greatly enriched through books created and sold under the copyright system.
Even worse, you're ignoring the massive amount of information made freely available on the internet, through scientific papers, and through IP that is voluntarily made available for free consumption by the authors (copyleft content, open-source code). And all of this information is more than you need to live a "good" life or learn almost anything you want to. The vast majority of content locked behind copyright is either entertainment or esoteric knowledge that isn't relevant or needed by anyone who can't afford it (e.g. high-energy particle physics textbooks). Approximately zero people are going to die because they can't get their hands on a copy of Introduction to High Energy Physics.
Finally, you do not have the right to the works of other people's hands without reimbursing them on their terms. That's theft. You can make your own work available for free, if you wish, but you do not have the ability to take other people's work.
The solution is already here. It is copyright. If you want to tune the knobs (e.g. reduce the length of copyright from "70 years after the author's death" to "15 years" or something), then that's fine and reasonable. But these arguments for both IP theft and what is essentially book-socialism directly conflict with both morality and empirical evidence.
This is my all-time favorite book, I’ve read through it numerous times. The level of detail and scope of focus is breathtaking. Its narrative reflects to me a deeper truth about the asymmetric leverage that mastery of a new technology bestows, and the unpredictable outcomes of its inevitabile diffusion among humans in a barely-stable world. I can’t recommend it enough, I feel like I learned something major about the nature of our species after completing it.
I'm about an hour into "The Making of the Atomic Bomb"! Great so far.
I recently finished "American Prometheus" the Pulitzer Prize winning biography of J. Robert Oppenheimer, and it was phenomenal. I recommend it highly. It's a great different perspective on the story of the making of the bomb since it's more focused on the man's life. Really cool.
I read this after seeing Oppenheimer. Just a tremendous book. I learned so much from his description of the early debates around the structure of atoms. It really illuminates the theorists' struggles with quantum mechanics and how, as we often see, progress required a new generation of thinkers.
I resisted seeing the movie for quite a while, maybe for similar reasons to you. I was certain it would be depressing.
It was much better than I expected. This will sound stupid but I didn't expect it to focus on the story of the man himself rather than the bomb (you'd think the title would be a hint).
> was foolishly violating the safety protocols by using a screwdriver to hold the two halves of the sphere apart. When the screwdriver slipped, the core dropped to form a critical mass
I always thought the material had to be forced together at high pressure for the chain reaction to start. Crazy that just dropping it had such dire consequences.
You don’t need to force the halves together quickly to start a chain reaction, but you do need to put them together fast to create a bomb. If it’s not fast enough you will get a “Fizzle” [0] where some chain reaction is occurring but not over a small enough timespan to make a bomb or to stop the material from disintegrating itself. A similar slow chain reaction process is used to control energy release in nuclear power plants.
This is also what happens in nuclear reactors that go bad. These aren't full blown nuclear explosions, and if there's any major explosion at all it's usually from the hydrogen that is created when hot metals touch water.
Feynman has an interesting story about critical mass:
> Los Alamos was going to make the bomb, but at Oak Ridge they were trying to separate the isotopes of uranium ... he saw them wheeling a tank carboy of water, green water - which is uranium nitrate solution. He says, “Uh, you're going to handle it like that when it's purified too? Is that what you're going to do?" They said, “Sure -- why not?" "Won't it explode?" he says. Huh! Explode?" ... he noticed certain boxes in big lots in a room, but he didn't notice a lot of boxes in another room on the other side of the same wall ... what you would have to do to fix this. It's rather easy. You put cadmium in solutions to absorb the neutrons in the water, and you separate the boxes so they are not too dense ...
It is fascinating for sure. I don't think there's anything in chemistry like it. It depends a lot on the geometry. A chemical reaction can be sped up or slowed down by the shape of something, but that's just because of exposed surface area.
In the case of Slotin, the thing he dropped onto the core was a neutron reflector so it redirected neutrons back into the core.
This is an interesting read, it's a story about a more recent near criticality that took place in 2011.. You can see a picture in the article of the dangerous configuration -- it's just a few rods of plutonium near each other. Any closer, if one tips over into the other, and they might go hot and release a huge amount of radiation.
> On August 21, 1945, less than a week after Japan notified the US that it would accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration, physicist Harry Daghlian was performing an experiment when he accidentally dropped a piece of “tamper” material, used to reflect neutrons back into the core, and triggered a critical mass. Daghlian used his bare hands to pull the mass apart to stop the chain reaction, and absorbed a fatal dose of radiation. He died three weeks later.
> As luck had it that August day, a supervisor returned from her lunch break, noticed the dangerous configuration, and ordered a technician to move the rods apart.
> But in so doing, she violated safety rules calling for a swift evacuation of all personnel in "criticality" events, because bodies — and even hands — can reflect and slow the neutrons emitted by plutonium, increasing the likelihood of a nuclear chain reaction.
> A more senior lab official instead improperly decided that others in the room should keep working, according to a witness and an Energy Department report describing the incident.
This part is confusingly worded.
Once the dangerous configuration was noticed what was the right thing to do?
> As a result, Nichols said, the first thing to do upon noticing a near-criticality is "the opposite of what you want to do," such as reach in and separate the offending materials. Instead, he said, those in charge should get "everyone to back off" and then call for engineers to start calculating safe approaches.
If you look at the energy per unit mass, e.g., J/kg, of different materials, you'll note that curiously many fuels (hydrogen, methane, petrol) and explosives (gunpowder, TNT, ANFO), you'll find that the former are roughly ten times (or more) greater.
What makes explosives, well, explosive isn't the total energy contained within them, it's the rate at which it's released. Jet fuel contains ten times the energy per unit mass than C4, and can in fact melt (or at least significantly weaken) steel beams, but it does so by burning over time.
What explosives do is to combine oxidiser and fuel in the same package (as with gunpowder and ANFO), or contain chemically-unstable bonds with high potential in a state which can be triggered by a sharp shock (TNT, C-4/RDX). The total energy released is smaller, but the rate of release is far greater.
It may be possible to use more conventional fuels to generate explosions. This happens with hydrogen gas, particularly in a stoichiometric combination with oxygen, with petrol within an internal combustion engine (the fuel burn is explosive), and in a fuel-air bomb (a/k/a thermobaric weapon), in which a fuel is widely dispersed in the atmosphere and then ignited. The blast generated is typically far weaker than of an equivalent conventional explosive, but can still be explosive rather than a deflagration (rapid combustion not generating a shock wave). Incidentally, virtually all cinematic "explosions" are in fact deflagrations, often using either flammable gas or suspended powder. There are also relatively frequent dust explosions involving powdered foodstuffs (grain, flour, sugar, etc.) which are a hazard where large quantities of such materials are stored or processed (grain silos, processing plants).
In particular, storage combinations of potential fuels and oxidisers in close proximity can lead to explosions.
There's also the case of spontaneous combustion particularly of oil-soaked rags or compost piles which shares some characteristics with criticality incidents. That's where heat release which in smaller concentrations would be benign reaches the ignition point of the materials involved. Large heaps of freshly-mown grass in particular can spontaneously ignite. I've had the experience of moving a large pile of woodchips which had been left in sub-freezing weather and discovering that the core of that pile was literally steaming hot, and was melting snow and evaporating water which had flowed in toward it. The chips weren't charring, but they were distinctly warm.
you say 'such dire consequences', but given that your apparent point of comparison is atomic bombs, i would rather say that the consequences were fairly mild: no buildings were destroyed, no fallout was released, and only one person died rather than hundreds of thousands. it didn't even kill everyone in the room, and the person who it did kill survived for over a week, though possibly he wished he hadn't
nuclear reactors also do not force material together at high pressure, but nevertheless achieve criticality
Basically the faster you go from non-critical to critical, the more energy you get out of a given amount of material. If you do it slowly it just blows itself apart before it can do much real damage.
If you have a small amount of material but enough to be critical and say, generate enough heat to melt itself into a puddle in a minute, it doesn't explode or anything, but before it melts and likely starts itself on fire, everybody nearby is going to get a lethal dose every few seconds.
In other words, there's a lot of room between "self-sustaining nuclear reaction" and "bomb".
Even storage of materials in warehouses has to be done carefully because too much too close can cause dangerous amounts of reactions.
I was also surprised. I thought you had to use an explosive to initiate the reaction. I never took the expression "critical mass" to such a literal expression, but it seems to be.
Criticality is simply the condition where on average a single neutron interacting with nucleii in the device will on average (through initiating fission) cause one or more additional neutrons to interact with nucleii.
Geometry and mass matters here because the "default" thing a neutron does is "misses all the nucleii and exits the device", unless the device is fairly big, simply because as electrically neutral particles neutrons do no interact with electrons and only interact with nucleii when very close, so most material looks mostly like empty space to them.
So in principle if you just form a large enough ball of Pu-239, it would go critical. The reason you need explosives is that in order to form that ball, you need to go from a state where there is not enough material together to go critical to a state where there is, and the criticality will immediately start releasing very large amounts of energy. This energy then heats things and drives them apart, preventing a chain reaction where the entire core goes up.
In the criticality accidents listed above, that is precisely what happened. In Slotin's case, the upper half of the core kept falling on the lower half and then pushed apart.
The reason you need explosives is that you want that release of energy to be as rapid as possible to make the contraption pass `bomb` object class duck typing.
If you kept criticality to a stable level and let energy of fuel release over e.g. 20 years, it's called a nuclear power plant. If you let it run away and let the material melt itself, it's called a meltdown situation. If you instead take highly purified fissile material and compressed it instantly into size of a peanut or however small you could, the material compressed experience nuclear chain reaction everywhere inside that peanut, and spontaneous release of that insane amount of energy resemble behaviors observed with conventional chemical explosive material exploding, and such a contraption that do this is somewhat metaphorically called an atomic "bomb".
They certainly can, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resonance_escape_probability. The all-important number in nuclear reactions is "k", the average number of child neutrons a single neutron will produce. The neutron population follows an equation something like N = exp((k - 1) * t). For k<1, you get exponential decay, and for k>1, you get exponential growth (until everything becomes a plasma and k changes). Check out https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_factor_formula.
The energy of neutrons isn't really analogous to the energy of atoms in chemical reactions, but absolutely affects the reaction dynamics. The "cross section", or interaction probability, is a strong function of neutron speed. In bombs the neutrons don't get a chance to slow down, but in reactors you try to reduce them to "room temperature" speeds using collisions with light, inert nuclei (the moderator). Here's a diagram showing the interaction probability vs. neutron speed for a few isotopes of uranium: https://tinyurl.com/u235-cross-section
It changes very little because there’s nothing to receive their kinetic energy.
Neutrons lose energy by colliding with things of similar mass, such as hydrogen nuclei (often in water). If they collide with a heavy nucleus, such as plutonium, they just bounce off without losing speed. (Or fission or capture.)
Think of billiards. The cue ball may slow or stop after hitting another ball, since they have similar masses. But hit the rail and it just bounces off, at the same speed, because the table is so much heavier.
If there are no light nuclei in the environment, then the neutrons won’t slow down.
No, as in, as the average distance a neutron-hitting nucleus travels before the collision increases, the average energy of the neutron at collision time decreases. Or so I imagine, that's what I'm asking.
The scenario was that the size of the material can increase until you guarantee a sufficiently high rate of collision, and I'm asking whether neutrons really do not lose energy as they travel prior to collision (as the scenario seems to assume).
Why would the average distance a neutron has to travel to strike a nucleus increase?
I suppose it does eventually, as the number of undecayed nuclei falls, but that wouldn’t be a significant effect until the criticality reaction had very significantly progressed. In other words the reaction can’t go on forever.
> Why would the average distance a neutron has to travel to strike a nucleus increase?
Because if the problem is that neutrons are escaping the object before hitting a nucleus, and we are adding more nuclei so the likelihood that they hit something increases, the new collision candidates will be further away than the old ones.
In other words, adding material to the edge of the object does not affect the per distance probability of collision. It only affects the overall probability of collision. Since the per distance probability does not change while the overall probability does, the probability increase must lie outside of the average path length of a neutron through the original object.
In the case we are considering, it doesn’t, but it could with other materials.
Consider that the wavelength of the neutron is a function of its energy, and that the cross sections for interaction between nuclei and neutrons are strong and complex functions of energy.
If the cross section for the interaction of interest gets smaller with decreasing energy, then it would be the case that the neutrons mean free path length would increase as energy decreased.
> In the case we are considering, it doesn’t, but it could with other materials.
Sorry, I said something subtle and easy to miss and also made a confusing typo, writing too fast.
"average distance a [nucleus-hitting neutron]"
As in, as more material is added, the percent of neutrons that successfully collide and don't just fly out increases. But, for the class of nucleus-hitting neutrons, the average distance prior to collision increases.
If the neutron loses energy as it travels, then as the average distance increases I suppose the probability of splitting the collidee nucleus decreases. So as the class increases in size, its rate of nucleus splitting may fall below the threshold, which bounds the useful size increase.
Perhaps this doesn't occur until the object has grown in size way past the point of basically guaranteed criticality, I haven't done the math, just curious since GP's statement sounded as if neutrons do not lose energy across any distance and the object could therefore could be increased to an arbitrary size while maintaining the same qualitative per-iteration behavior, and I find that surprising.
In the regime that's interesting for pure fission devices, the opposite is true. The cross section increases as energy decreases. This is why moderators are a thing in nuclear reactors.
I may be misremembering, but it seems like I've read that the explosive variation is the "supercritical mass". Critical masses aren't anything to sneeze at though, unless you like the tickle of fast neutrons massaging your internal organs.
Criticality is what you get in a nuclear reactor and what killed Slotkin. Supercriticality requires explosives. One is a self-sustaining chain reaction, the other is a runaway chain reaction.
Dropping/gravity had nothing to do with it or an impact. When it dropped it fell onto the pile and once there the total mass was now enough for it to go supercritical.
Rehashing some of what's been said and adding to it:
A nuclear chain reaction occurs where more neutrons enter into a fissible mass than leave it, where those neutrons trigger additional fission events.
"Criticality" is the point at which that neutron emission is just balanced: the same number are added as are consumed. This is often fairly stable, and can be further controlled with moderating systems (e.g., control rods, circulating water, or neutron reflectors which increase neutron flow). There's also the matter of "prompt" vs. "delayed" neutrons. The first, prompt neutrons, are emitted immediately following a fission event, the latter occur after some delay, from milliseconds to minutes or longer. The ratio of prompt to delayed neutrons also matters in controlling a nuclear reaction.
A nuclear reaction at criticality is not a bomb, at least not necessarily. What it is however is sustained, which is to say that the nuclear reaction will continue unless circumstances change.
A nuclear bomb, and specifically a fission bomb, requires not only a critical mass but a supercritical one, with a large amount of the material going critical at once. The challenge for the engineer is that nuclear reactions release so much energy that the explosive material itself can be blown apart before enough of it has time to react. So the trick is to transition between subcritical and supercritical masses quickly.
For Uranium-235, the reaction is slow enough that a "bullet-style" design is sufficient. A supercritical mass is arranged in two pieces, which are separated until detonation is desired, at which point one (usually smaller) mass is shot into the other, like a bullet down a gun-barrel. Plutonium-239 is so fissile that this would result in premature criticality and only a small fraction of the material would fission before being blown apart. Instead, an implosion design is used, in which a subcritical mass of plutonium is surrounded by explosive charges which, when detonated, compress the core sufficiently that it does achieve criticality, and the much larger nuclear explosion follows.
The Uranium bullet-style device was considered sufficiently reliable that it was not tested. The Hiroshima bombing was the first detonation of this style of weapon. The Trinity test was to confirm the theory of a plutonium implosion-style design, and Nagasaki saw the second explosion of such a weapon.
In the case of the Hiroshima (uranium) bomb, about 1 g of matter was converted to energy, and about 660 g of a total fissile mass of ~51 kg actually reacted, or about 1.3% of the total mass. Essentially the bomb was already coming apart before any more material could engage in fission. See: <https://old.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/1546rcv/why_did...>
I believe values are about the same for the Nagasaki weapon.
TL;DR: it became the Demon Core, after its core was repurposed in criticality experiments with poor methodology. Though the article is mostly about the politics of Japan's surrender, and of maybe/not dropping the third bomb.
Kinda offtopic:
> Private Robert Hemmerly, was also irradiated but survived, only to die of cancer 33 years later.
The phrasing is odd, "only to ..." is a colloquialism to indicate bad luck, as in to escape one bad event only to immediately fall to another bad event.
But living 33 more years is a good amount of life! (and long enough interval to start doubting a direct causality between the irradiation and the cancer)
> and long enough interval to start doubting a direct causality between the irradiation and the cancer
A report from Los Alamos Scientific Lab (1979) draws the same conclusion:
For example, a brother of [Hemmerly] also died of leukemia (and
three other siblings are believed to have had cancer). This makes it
likely there is a familial component to the development of the disease.
I strongly recommend the book "Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety". It's a nice view of how many more bombs we made and how incapable we are of responsibly managing them even before questioning the rationality of the state.
I second this, it is a great book. It's an eye opening and terrifying look at what is involved in managing these weapons. A lot of people take nuclear weapons for granted these days, but the book drives home how fortunate we are that there hasn't been a horrible accident at some point.
Just started a book on the American Occupation (Architects of Occupation). It's interesting realize that the US at one point was able to rebuild a society from the ground up. They took the lessons from Versailles and made a peace (and society) that lasted for a surprisingly long time.
That success in Japan and Europe probably emboldened the B team, who went on to handle regime change in Central/South America, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia.
That's the difference between reading the book and reading the cliff notes, presumably.
Japan and Germany success post-war were not due to US occupation but in spite of it. Both were pretty industrialized nations before the war and had highly skilled population. Their success afterward was a continuation of their previous trend but under a different regime.
It is true both countries were already industrious, but it was far from a given they could go back to their former self. They were both utterly destroyed, and things could have gone really badly, especially in Japan.
I can't find the reference right but I remember reading average adult calorie intake to drop to ~1200 kcals in 1947/1948 in "embracing defeat" by John Dower. That period has a huge influence on Japan to this day, including architecture of Tokyo through black market.
Both Japan and Germany had strong military govt culture, and became reliably democratic at the end of the allies occupation.
Sure things could have gone wrong. They did, for example, for Ukraine or most of Eastern Europe. But my point is, were these countries not previously industrialized, they probably wouldn’t have fared as they did now.
I guess this was a joke? But if not, fyi, ramen is from China. Sure, the Japanese have made it their own but even the Japanese don't list it in restaurant guides as Japanese food. There's a section for "Japanese food (和食)" and a separate section for "Chinese Food and Ramen" (中華閭里とラーメン) or it's in a separate category. It's still often called "Chinese Soba" (中華蕎麦）
It’s funny that ramen is literally lamian (拉面), but the Chinese will distinguish between Chinese lamian and Japanese ramen in their own country, it is considered foreign food although it is easy to find the Chinese food it descends from.
The US and its Cold War allies wanted to use West Germany as a strategic partner against the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union wanted to stripmine East Germany for reparations. Before the end of WW2, the Soviet Union had received large amounts of military aid from the Allies. After WW2 Europe continued to receive aid in the form of the Marshall Plan, which provided heavy discounts on US exports and loans that were mostly forgiven later on.
West Germany's economic boom was in part due to the German government expecting to have to pay the loans back in full and thus setting up a public fund that provided credit to businesses and the rebuilding effort rather than paying them out as direct subisidies to industry. When the loans were eventually forgiven this created a massive windfall. The successor program to the Marshall Plan was explicitly tied to "defeating communism" and focused on military development, which resulted in West Germany rearming despite earlier decisions that the country should be demilitarized. This change of plan was extremely controversial within West Germany and debates around the military involvement of Germany continues to this day.
In East Germany on the other hand, the rebuilding effort happened despite the Soviet Union not with the help of it. Reparations continued even after a lot of the industry had been dismantled and shipped to Eastern Europe while the isolation from Western Europe provided limited opportunities for export and the scarcity of resources meant a lot of early industry was built to provide for the population rather than trade.
Given the conditions, East Germany performed remarkably well, although of course it had a despotic government that would literally shoot its own citizens rather than allow them to leave for greener pastures. The US was also extremely hands-off on West German politics after the immediate occupation era. Presumably a major factor was that the US didn't have as much skin in the game as its European allies whereas e.g. France literally had been occupied by Germans during the war, resulting in much stronger resentment.
It's also worth noting that one of the plans for post-war Germany by the Western allies was full deindustrialization to a greater extent than what the Soviet Union ended up implementing with the explicit goal of turning Germany into an agrarian state incapable of forming a military for the forseeable future. This became less interesting as the divisions between the Soviet Union and the Western Allies became clearer but it wasn't entirely unlikely.
‘The Marshall Plan made it possible for West Germany to return quickly to its traditional pattern of industrial production with a strong export sector. Without the plan, agriculture would have played a larger role in the recovery period, which itself would have been longer. With respect to Austria, Günter Bischof has noted that "the Austrian economy, injected with an overabundance of European Recovery Program funds, produced "miracle" growth figures that matched and at times surpassed the German ones."’
Aid to Japan was similarly crucial and amounted to billions of dollars. These payments were separate from the Marshall Plan, which focused on Europe. Pre-war Japan was not a free market economy and subsequently underwent massive reform.
Honestly, I get that it’s cool to bash on the US (I am not American) but give credit where it’s due. US-led post-war reconstruction was of enormous and lasting significance.
A better explanation for the "German Miracle" was they turned to free markets.
As for Japan, the US occupation was advised by leftist professors, who deemed that big business was bad and small business was good. Japan remained prostrate under that policy. When it was changed to allow big business to operate again, Japan became a huge economic success story.
A big part of the "German Miracle" is that while Germany got less money than Britain or France they assumed they'd have to pay all of it back and when they didn't, that created a massive windfall that was used to provide affordable loans to businesses and reconstruction efforts. The "KfW" still exists as a public credit bank today - most younger people aren't aware its name literally expands to "credit institute for reconstruction" in German.
West Germany formally has a "social market economy" and while there have been pushes towards a "free market" economy those were largely the result of reforms from the 1980s onwards. I don't think "free markets" is a good explanation when looking at Germany vs Britain or France in the 1950s to 1970s.
My father, who was part of the military occupation force in Japan. He also was a professional historian and economist. The economy remained flat until big business was allowed to resume operation.
> I'm no expert, but the more common narrative is the Korean war was a stimulant for the Japanese economy.
People can't stand the idea that the free market works. :-/
Would love to hear more from this viewpoint. On the surface I don’t see how your argument is against the OP, isn’t it very conceivable that the “continuation of previous trend but under a different regime” was actually part of the occupation plan?
Not arguing against you but the logic needs to be filled out some.
This, pretty much. Both the Germans and Japanese knew, in exhaustive detail, how to build and run a modern industrial country. And given the obvious alternative (sheltering in bombed-out smoking ruins, more-or-less) they very quickly decided to Do Whatever It Took to regain their former standards of living.
This is what happened in the Netherlands. After the war the entire population genuinely believed that they were engaged in rebuilding the nation into something better.
Turns out humans can do a lot if they work together- ofcourse it usually takes a near apocalyptic event. And it never lasts.
For purposes of rebuilding, civilian deaths (from all causes, including Germany's national suicide cult insanity shit) are at least as damaging. Similar for all the millions who lived, but were badly damaged themselves - mentally and/or physically.
US occupation probably did shift energy away from militarism and towards economy though, no? Wars that didn't happen would have hurt them and instead of happening the effort of the wars was put towards making stuff.
It's a mixed back. Germany was supposed to be demilitarized following the immediate end of WW2 but the successor to the Marshall Plan (which was actually fairly short-lived relative to what many people seem to think) was a US program to rebuild the European military as a bullwark against communism. This led to a reversal on the decision that Germany should never have a military again although it was initially limited to purely defensive operations - a restriction that has been repeatedly weakened due to the insistence of its allies, including the US.
A bigger difference between the two Germanies is that East German industry was mostly stripped for parts as part of reparations to the Soviet Union which continued for a long time whereas West Germany received active funding as part of the Marshall Plan. West Germany also had access to a lucrative market for exports whereas East Germany had to focus on reparations first, self-sustainability second and trade at a distant third with very bad returns.
It's a bit more complicated. The reparations were a bigger concern in the early interwar period and hamstrung the Weimar government but a big problem was that although Weimar Germany was formally a democratic republic following the deposition of the Emperor, a lot of its institutions were still monarchists and saw the social democrats as traitors, hoping for a restoration of the monarchy.
For example while especially in the build-up to 1933 a lot of the political violence and murders came from the political right and especially the NSDAP, German courts would repeatedly rule the attackers "not guilty" if the victims were on the political left because they did it "out of the love for their country" (i.e. the monarchy). Even the "rise to power" of the NSDAP was a de-facto legal process following the passing of the Enabling Act, co-signed by the conservative Christian "center party" which saw the NSDAP as a tool to defeat communism, believing that Adolf Hitler would use his power to restore the Emperor to the throne and transfer his power to him.
It's difficult to tell how things would have played out without the crippling reparations but given Germany's actual history I don't think it's plausible that Weimar Germany would have been stable without it even if it was something that fueled the political right's narrative of betrayal. Germany simply did not have a history of democracy to build on.
I think one of the most genius moves following WW2 was to fully dismantle Prussia by restructuring Germany. This was more than a cession of territories, even the parts of Prussia that remained part of Germany were dissolved and integrated into new subdivisions without a clear one-to-one mapping. In modern Germany the strongest remaining notion of Prussia is a general idea of "everything north of Bavaria" mostly present in Bavaria (notably one of the states that remained unchanged after the restructuring - a mistake in my opinion). Prussian identity was inseparable from militarism and a sense of supremacy, even without the formal monarchy.
Another possible move would have been to strip German royalty and nobility of its titles and claims like in France but this would have never been supported by the European monarchies like Britain, which often had strong dynastic ties to these families.
what lessons? The Allies didn't occupy Germany at all. Germany would have resumed the war if that was what the Versailles conference came up with, and the Allies had no stomach for more war.
> what lessons? The Allies didn't occupy Germany at all
Of course we did [1]. The ACC was far more intrusive than the American occupation of Japan; we formally stripped Germany of its sovereignty.
EDIT: the lesson from Versailles was that we had to rebuild Germany. To rebuild required occupation. Occupying Germany after WWII was one of the lessons learned from Versailles.
I think the person you are replying to meant that the allies didn't occupy Germany after WWI (and therefore there could be few lessons from Versailles on nation building), your link posts to WWII.
They were all exhausted. US troops had been sent home. If Germany had said, "Nope, not signing that" results would have been unpredictable. But meekly submitting was unlikely.
your link and comments are about WW II. Versailles was the treaty that ended WW I.
> Germany was in no position to keep fighting.
No one was in 1918 and everyone was exhausted, but "defending the homeland" is a more powerful motivator than anything the Allies had. Germany asked for an Armistice "on the basis of the 14 Points" which did not include occupation.
> No one was in 1918 and everyone was exhausted […]
The US had just entered the war after the Zimmerman telegram, and so Allied powers had more man power and more industrial strength. The Central powers were the ones that were exhausted, especially after the Hundred Days Offensive.
You're right that Germany was whipped, but the persistence of the "stab in the back" theory in the 20's and 30's demonstrated that they hadn't quite internalized that. After all, they hadn't been invaded, and "news" back then was so heavily censored that the Germans didn't all know the real situation.
I believe the parsing intended might have been that the UK and France were "equally exhausted" .. not that the US suffered losses comparable to either.
Even so, the UK lost 3/4 million from 45 million whereas France lost 1.1 million from 39 million .. so that's kind of order of magnitude roughly ballpark from a distance, but France got hit harder.
Correct. The UK and France put together were as exhausted as Germany. And "exhaustion" can't be measured just in body counts. Recall that France had some very serious mutinies around the time of the battle of Verdun.
The "lessons of Versailles" is a dumb phrase. Germany only asked for an Armistice "on the basis of the 14 Points" although Wilson didn't manage to pull that off over England and France's objections.
So we have two counterfactuals, neither of which can be settled:
1) Wilson doesn't propound his 14 Points. Perhaps he loses the election of 1912.
2) He does and the Armistice happens as it actually did, but the Paris Peace Conference declares that the Allies are going to occupy Germany and reshape its government, or maybe Germany is to be dismembered.
It's #2 that this phrase seems to imply. I'd claim that if that happens, no peace treaty is signed at all, similar to the way that the Korean War is technically still going on. The Allies would not have invaded Germany. Russia was already out of the war.
It's of course up for debate, but one of the general assessments is that the resentment caused by the Treaty of Versailles gave fertile ground for the rise of the Nazi party. It's hard to see how unconditional surrender would have made the treaty more palatable to Germans rather than less.
I would rather say that the fact that there was a (conditional) surrender by Germany and it took place before the Allies had significantly entered German homeland territory enabled certain agitators to claim that Germany had been betrayed rather than defeated.
You are correct that the punitive nature of the Treaty of Versailles made for good grist for the mill when those same agitators to point at the "unfair" consequences of the betrayal.
After WWII there was no one who could possibly say that Germany had not been completely and utterly defeated (and the Allies, at least the western ones with respect to western Germany) did invest in rebuilding the country.
The WWI ended with an armistice, and then a peace treaty. It was intended to save Germany from the shame of total defeat. The problem with that was that peace terms were extremely harsh, as you would impose on an inconditional surrender, and France intention was to get revenge, applying the terms of the treaty as hard as they could. Said agitators tried to take advantage of that duality: "we didn't surrender, yet we are being humiliated".
The lesson for WWII was that as shameful it could be for Japan to surrender inconditionally, it was needed to shut those sectors of the society that would think they could had won the war if only...
This was more a problem with Japan than Germany in the WWII: Germany never (seriously) wanted a negotiated peace, and specially the soviets didn't want any of that. It's know that Hitler and friends wanted either victory or the complete annihilation of Germany. But Japan actively tried in the last couple of months of the war to achieve a conditional surrender.
> Germany never (seriously) wanted a negotiated peace
Hitler knew that he'd be hung when the war was over. He knew what happened to Mussolini. He was never going to allow a negotiated peace.
The idea behind the officers' plot to kill him was that then Germany could sue for peace. Failing to kill Hitler meant the war was going to continue to the bitter end.
Eisenhower and the Dulles Brothers weren't interested in nation building, they were intent on countering the Soviet Union's meddling and/or preserving USA business interests.
It was quite common "back in the day" to call what was properly "the Soviet Union" just "Russia". And it wasn't just pure sloppiness, either; the Soviet Union and its predecessor Russian Empire both had Russia as their heart and soul.
Also, everything in this article has been well known for ages. No need to hold back your trust. It's a nice writeup though!
https://deportetie.kartes.lv is but one illustration of Soviet != Russia for history buffs. An empire's heart and soul is usually black ice. The USSR was not an exception.
no more "sloppiness" than to refer to the USSR as just "Moscow", as that's where the majority of important decisions, the kinds that nuclear weapon would fall into, were made.
Russia is historical name of Ukraine before Moscow renamed their empire into Russian Empire. Ethnic Russians took meeting in 1910 and rebranded themselves into Ukrainians, to avoid confusion with bloody empire, then started Great Ukrainization, to separate themselves from enslaved and erased nations, which ended with mass murder of millions of Ukrainians by Russians in 1932-1934.
Russian Empire died and buried in a grave in 1917. Don't dig it up, please.
Is it just me, or should we be way more horrified by the fact that the US dropped atomic bombs on civilians? It would be like Russia dropping two bombs in Kyiv today, which is unthinkable, but it feels the US bombing of Japan is kind of shrugged off.
Obviously looking at it from today's perspective it's (hopefully) unthinkable, but there is a lot written from contemporary sources which make a fairly persuasive argument.
The main concerns were that the Japanese government was simply not in a place where it could surrender, which meant a ground invasion of the Japanese mainland was seen as mandatory. Given the prior experiences of how dedicated Japanese defenders could be (eg Mount Suribachi), it was assumed that any actual attempt to take the Japanese mainland would result in untold deaths, to the point where the US has enough Purple Heart medals created (in anticipation of the casualties am invasion would involve) that they didn't have to restart production until 2008. As horrifying as it is, the first atomic bomb was considered the lesser evil. That said, Nagasaki is much much harder to defend.
Unrelated, but I recommend everyone who can to visit Hiroshima and visit the museums there. Hopefully it will instill in everyone a fervent desire to never again see such horrific things enacted again.
> Unrelated, but I recommend everyone who can to visit Hiroshima and visit the museums there. Hopefully it will instill in everyone a fervent desire to never again see such horrific things enacted again.
The Nagasaki muesum is very good, too. And it's a nicer town to visit today. (We were just there last month.)
> That said, Nagasaki is much much harder to defend.
The first bomb was dropped August 6.
The Japanese War Cabinet met on August 9 to discuss the situation, and concluded that the US didn't have the resources for more, so they concluded to not surrender. Even after the first bomb was dropped.
In the middle of the meeting they learned of the second bomb which was dropped that morning.
After the second bomb the War Cabinet was split 3-3. They called in the full cabinet and that was split as well.
Two bombs weren't enough to decisively convince them to surrender, and so the Emperor had to be called in to break the deadlock.
And yet we are to believe that even though two bombs were barely enough to force a surrender, zero bombs would have sufficed?
Japan's decision to surrender was most likely due to the fact that the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria with 1.5 million men.[1] Yes, the atomic bombings were horrible, but the fire bombing of Tokyo wasn't much better. The Japanese regime didn't care that much. When the Soviets declared war that was the breaking point and their situation became hopeless. This point is very often overlooked by US based media and historians (I guess for obvious reasons), but the fact of the matter is that we don't know if only the two bombs would've been enough to make Japan capitulate.
> This point is very often overlooked by US based media and historians (I guess for obvious reasons), but the fact of the matter is that we don't know if only the two bombs would've been enough to make Japan capitulate.
This is covered by Walker in his book Prompt and Utter Destruction:
And he still concludes that dropping the bombs was a necessary element in their surrender.
The Japanese were expecting the Russians/Soviets to enter the war: the only surprise was that it was sooner than they expected (Spring 1946). Fighting them was already taken into account in their 'calculations'.
From a 1946 article:
> About a week after V-J Day, I was one of a small group of scientists and engineers interrogating an intelligent, well-informed Japanese Army officer in Yokohama. We asked him what, in his opinion, would have been the next major move if the war had continued. He replied: "You would probably have tried to invade our homeland with a landing operation on Kyushu about November 1. I think the attack would have been made on such and such beaches."
> "Could you have repelled this landing?" we asked, and he answered: "It would have been a very desperate fight, but I do not think we could have stopped you."
> "What would have happened then?" we asked.
> He replied: "We would have kept on fighting until all Japanese were killed, but we would not have been defeated," by which he meant that they would not have been disgraced by surrender.
I'd be willing to bet that the Japanese would have been willing to pull out of Manchuria, lose that territory, and use those troops for home island defence.
> I'd be willing to bet that the Japanese would have been willing to pull out of Manchuria
Given the success of Soviet's new combined arm doctrine (later called “deep battle”), I don't think “pull out of Manchuria” would have been a possibility, as the Japanese force there would very likely have collapsed to a point where getting back to Japan would have been impossible (think Dunkirk but with much more land to leave behind you and with an enemy moving even faster and where you don't have neither air or sea superiority).
Japan was in talks with the soviets for a couple of months, thinking that they were somewhat neutral and intermediating with the USA a negotiated peace. On the 9th they learned the hard way that it was a ploy while they massed troops, and their situation was now a full invasion of the USA with nukes and the Soviets, with zero allies or even neutrals to lean on
How Japan made the decision to surrender is well covered in the book "Japan's Longest Day", originally published in 1973. Many of the major players were interviewed. There's a reasonably accurate movie version worth watching, if you're interested in this.
It's a very strange story of decision-making under extreme pressure. No one was in charge. The Navy was barely talking to the Army. The civilian government had been sidelined from control of military matters years before. The Emperor was supposed to be a figurehead. And, as pointed out above, there was an attempted coup to stop the surrender.
So killing civilians en masse is fine, as long it forces the enemy to surrender with (probably) fewer casualties? Why even have laws of war then, if we adjust adjudicate these questions with a utilitarian calculus?
> So killing civilians en masse is fine, as long it forces the enemy to surrender with (probably) fewer casualties
Of course not. Startegic calculations for warfare should not be conflated with a moral justifications for military actions. We have to come to terms with the fact that it was a morally unjustifiable decision, regardless of the effects it had on the war. This is something that too many people forget today.
> Why even have laws of war then
I think laws of war (the ones that work) are only an attempt to change the incentives that are presented to the belligerents during warfare, in such a way that the confilct is less damaging. They are not much about making the belligerents more morally virtuous in any sense other than a consequentialist / utlitarian one.
They didn't by our standards. A lot of what we think of as the laws of war today were clarified after WWII. Bombing civilians was illegal, but not in retaliation; so the US could bomb Hiroshima because the Axis had bombed Coventry. The fact that that was the Germans and probably an accident didn't matter.
If this seems extremely sketchy that's because it was, but so was Nuremberg. The Holocaust wasn't illegal for the Nazis to do to their own population - the prosecutors at the trials had to make up a standard of "behavior that shocks the conscience" that previously didn't exist in international law.
None of this reflects on morality, only legality, of course. But the legalities then were pretty primitive.
What makes you say, that the bombing of Coventry was "probably an accident"? There was repeated, and clearly well planned out bombing of the city between 1940-1942 [1].
It was not a remark intended to excuse the Germans. There is some evidence, which I am admittedly struggling to find a citation for at the moment, that the early 1940 raids were generally intended to hit military targets and the Germans just weren't good enough at bombing to be that discriminate.
Later on of course both sides were hitting civilian targets deliberately, and using incendiaries and high explosives. But it's possible the British were the first to do it deliberately, in retaliation for the Germans doing it accidentally (which they naturally did not believe).
Another factor in the surrender was the Japanese had intelligence that a third bomb was to be dropped on Tokyo. (That intelligence later turned out to be false.)
One bomb could have been all that America had. Two bombs meant more were coming.
You're just missing an entire half of the story here: which is the USSR attacking on the 9th of August!
Of course if you omit the second most important factor then things start becoming obvious, but in reality the answer to this question is far from obvious (in neither direction, needless to say, the tankies who claim with certainty that the bombing was not needed are equally wrong)
> The Japanese War Cabinet met on August 9 to discuss the situation, and concluded that the US didn't have the resources for more
does that sound believable to you? The Japanese somehow had intel on a secret new weapon? And confident about it to the point they are willing to bet their entire country on it, in a war that's already ending?
> The Japanese somehow had intel on a secret new weapon
Yes. They did. The Mexico branch of the Japanese espionage service knew about the Trinity test in advance and sent agents to collect fallout to analyze. They already knew before Hiroshima that we had a working atomic bomb. They underestimated our isotope separation production capacity because their own U-235 isotope separation plant was behind schedule. There have been books written about the Japanese atomic bomb project. The day after Hiroshima, the Japanese government announced "We also have atomic bombs and we will use them against the invasion forces." They were expecting the war to last another year. The head of the Japanese atomic bomb project said that his military boss expected the war to last another year.
Japan didn't know until August 9 that the US was able to build plutonium bombs.
Edit since I can't reply: The difference is meaningful when you're deciding whether to surrender. If you know that the US doesn't have enough refined uranium for another uranium bomb, and you have no evidence that the US can build plutonium bombs, then you have grounds to believe the bombing of Hiroshima was not repeatable.
> If you know that the US doesn't have enough refined uranium for another uranium bomb […]
There was no way for the Japanese to know what the US was capable of. It was wishful thinking with zero evidence on the part of the Japanese leadership.
So did the Germans, but it's not because the biggest industrial power on earth (in both demography and industrial output), with its capacities fully intact because the war never took place there, that smaller countries diminished after years of blockade and critical infrastructure bombing can do it too…
If the Japanese projected their own capacity on the US, they were ripe for a bad surprise.
The unstated assumption in this is that it was important for the US to be the one to defeat Japan. It was not just about defeating Japan, it was also about the Soviet Union not defeating it first.
The US had been continously fire bombing Japan at the point the atomic bombs dropped. In the grand scheme of things the bombs were just very large blips in waves upon waves of destruction.
Japan would have been defeated without a US ground invasion and without the atomic bombs. But it would have been defeated by the Soviet Union, not the US.
There were three possible outcomes:
* an unconditional surrender to the Soviet Union, possibly following the death or arrest of the Emperor
* a conditional surrender to the US granting immunity to the Emperor
* an unconditional last-ditch surrender to the US to prevent a Soviet advance and further loss of territory
The atomic bombs played a very small part in this. As has been stated repeatedly in attempts to justify their use: the Japanese were "dedicated" to defend the mainland and the Emperor to the point of performing suicide attacks. The deaths from the atomic bombings meant very little relative to the civilian lives that had already been lost to the fire bombings before, after and throughout. But in consequence this meant that the integrity of the mainland territory and the life of the Emperor meant a lot - and this was threatened by the prospect of an invasion, not further atomic bombings.
The sad irony is that the demand of the surrender being unconditional was ultimately more about narrative-building and optics as the US effectively gave Japan what it wanted by leaving the Emperor untouched and not making any territorial changes. It's clear to see why the US demanded it but the outcome effectively met most of the terms a conditional surrender would have set prior to the atomic bombings.
In consequence the atomic bombs provided very little strategic benefits and only meant the US would have to go on with those attacks on its conscience - not that it seemed to weigh too heavily.
It is a bit surprising that so much damage was inflicted on civilians with firebombing and all for the sake of what looks like vindictiveness. Surely after the victory it would have been possible to write the books, stating it was « unconditional surrender » regardless of what kind of surrender it actually was (it is victors who tend to be able to write history books as they see fit.)
The Japanese populace, whether they wanted to or not, was fully prepared and planning to defend the home islands with their lives as gruesomely as possible.
If America had not dropped the bombs and the Soviets ended up finishing off Japan like so many seem to think they would, the Soviets at the end of the war were NOT known for being gentle in their dominance.
There was no ending to Japan in WWII that did not kill hundreds of thousands of civilians.
Strategic bombing were attempted multiple time during the war (first by the Germans on UK, and the UK/US on Germany then Japan) without success (and in most cases it actually strengthened the resolve)
In the documentary The Fog of War, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara recalls General Curtis LeMay, who relayed the Presidential order to drop nuclear bombs on Japan, said:
"If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?
Selden mentions another critique of the nuclear bombing, which he says the U.S. government effectively suppressed for twenty-five years, as worth mention. On 11 August 1945, the Japanese government filed an official protest over the atomic bombing to the U.S. State Department through the Swiss Legation in Tokyo
Truth is most people here are hypocrites, might makes right and the end justifies the means, but only for our side! Mind you, I'm no arguing that these obvious truths are wrong, but intellectual honesty shouldn't go to the trash in favour of wishful thinking and posturing.
We should be as exactly horrified as we are by the fact the US dropped convential high explosives and incendaries on civilians.
The firebombing of Tokyo had similar death and injury stats to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, and there were another 72 cities in Japan completely destroyed by bombing prior to the atomic weapons being rushed into use before the war ended.
Cities in Europe were also bombed, and later more tonnage was dropped by the US in SE Asia than they dropped in WWII .. many of those mines dropped remain to this day, still killing and maiming children.
> We should be as exactly horrified as we are by the fact the US dropped convential high explosives and incendaries on civilians.
Not exactly. Having firebombs at our disposal does not require the head of one country to have unaccountable power over the lives of everyone on earth. Firebombs do not require entire industries shrouded in secrecy, nor the transformation of security clearance, or lack there of, into a weapon for shutting down public inquiry and challenges, nor the creation of parallel government structure both invisible and unaccountable to the public.
The effects on the cities may not be that different, but nuke's unmitigated corruption of the democratic system is certainly horrifying.
> We should be as exactly horrified as we are by the fact the US dropped convential high explosives and incendaries on civilians.
And we should be exactly as horrified for what the Japanese did to mainland China. Or the fact that they allied themselves with one of the greatest genocides in history. We should be exactly as horrified at what the alternative was, which was hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of casualties that would have been caused by a conventional invasion just to get that country to stop doing what it was doing.
> should we be way more horrified by the fact that the US dropped atomic bombs on civilians?
Not really.
Strategic bombing, as a concept, was about killing civilians. The idea that you should try not to kill civilians in war was still an evolving concept around WWII, in part because precision munitions and industrial warmaking were in their infancy and toddlerhood, respectively.
It was also a response to the horrors of world war 1, where armies faced each other in open fields and the conflict dragged on for years without lines changing much. The reasoning was that ending the war quickly by completely destroying the enemy's capacity and will to continue fighting was better than letting it drag on and become a meat grinder, even if that meant bombing civilians and civilian industry. Obviously this didn't work since WWII was both longer and more deadly than WWI but that was the thinking.
The US dropped not just the nuclear bombs on civilians.
> The raids that were conducted by the U.S. military on the night of 9–10 March 1945, codenamed Operation Meetinghouse, are the single most destructive bombing raid in human history.[1] 16 square miles (41 km2; 10,000 acres) of central Tokyo was destroyed, leaving an estimated 100,000 civilians dead and over one million homeless.[1] The atomic bombing of Hiroshima in August 1945, by comparison, resulted in the immediate death of an estimated 70,000 to 150,000 people.
I highly recommend the book 'Flyboys' by James Bradley (also the author of Flags of our Fathers) for help putting this period of WWII into context. A good portion of the end of the book discusses the firebombing of Japan and the dropping of the two nuclear bombs, and how that was rationalized as acceptable in the minds of those who participated.
The final Japanese defense of their home islands would have involved arming every man, woman, and child, for them to act as suicide warriors. "The Glorious Death of the 100 Million" (note the name was an exaggeration of their actual population)
This made the entire population a military target (except for very young children, I guess).
That applies to every country with any kind of universal draft or conscription. For example, that’s more or less the argument that Hamas was making to justify its hostage-taking some months ago.
It's still not 100% clear if the nuclear bombing was necessary to force the Japanese to surrender, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria could have been enough, making the civilian casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki pointless victims.
Of what relevance is that question? Was the US supposed to determine that the use was necessary before it was used? How is that even supposed to be determined, especially in wartime when the inner workings of the enemy are opaque?
How is that an argument? In all conflicts the inner working of the enemy are someone opaque, why should this lead to assuming that everyone including women and children is a legit military target?
The observation about the militarization of the entire society is a defense against the charge that dropping the bomb was a war crime, even if the decision makers didn't know it at the time.
I see you think that even presenting legal arguments in defense against war crime charges is "the reasoning of war criminals". I guess you're not big on the idea of legal defense when charged for a crime. A real fan of justice, aren't you. /s
> The observation about the militarization of the entire society is a defense against the charge that dropping the bomb was a war crime,
Except there wasn't such “observation” and we cannot be certain that it would have happened. You are assuming that the Japanese would have fought this way, and you use this assumption to defend the idea that they were all legit targets.
> even if the decision makers didn't know it at the time.
What?
> I see you think that even presenting legal arguments in defense against war crime charges is "the reasoning of war criminals". I guess you're not big on the idea of legal defense when charged for a crime.
Except it's not “a legal argument in defense of war crime charge” at all, to accept it as an argument one must adhere to your vision in the first place, which make it a very weak defense to say the least. Akin to “yes I killed my wife but she was completely crazy and I'm sure I'd have killed me first at some point”, which I'd doubt any lawyer would be happy if you said that in court…
The horrifying thing is that the US knew the Japanese wanted to surrender, and knew that demanding abdication of the emperor was both a major impediment, unnecessary and in fact harmful (because it would reduce the number of outposts that would accept the surrender order). The US had broken the codes used with messages to diplomats in the USSR and other traffic and could clearly see the Japanese situation. Despite this they never waivered from ambiguous "unconditional surrender" terminology... likely so they could continue pressing the front in Korea which would also end with a peace.
So the US could have had peace earlier, with several hundred thousand less deaths, if they had been willing to put in writing specifically what they actually wanted, and what they got in the end.
The viable alternative would have been demanding a surrender but stating that The Emperor will remain as a constitutional monarch - which is what the US ended up imposing anyway because it was the logical way to forestall resistance from a radicalized population. Such a demand would likely have resulted in a surrender before the atomic bombings.
The earliest surrender request wasn't merely just for the emperor to stay in power. Japan also wanted to keep the territories they had acquired and manage all post-war trials of the military in-house.
Any American general or politician that agreed to these terms would have been seen as a fool or a coward, especially after Pearl Harbor, Bataan, Singapore, etc.
We have records of Japanese high rank military wanting to keep fighting after the dropping of the second bomb. They figured out the USA might have a couple more nukes, so Japan should endure them four and keep fighting.
As said in other threads, it was the nukes and the soviets invading what finally forced the surrender.
> The horrifying thing is that the US knew the Japanese wanted to surrender
> So the US could have had peace earlier, with several hundred thousand less deaths, if they had been willing to put in writing specifically what they actually wanted, and what they got in the end.
These points are both highly contested, yet you say them as if they are foregone conclusions.
I enjoy taking a position on things. It is a mentally stimulating to research an ambiguous situation, research it, come to a conclusion, and then unabashedly speak to your beliefs.
One is not obligated to put disclaimers and counter-arguments in every comment, so long as you treat other people's counter-arguments with respect (which for me mostly means resisting the urge to reply to replies). In fact I think HN and discourse in general is at it's best when lots of people put forth different ideas, clearly and specifically articulated.
It took me a long time to come to this style of discourse. If you haven't tried it, I heartily recommend dabbling in simply and directly stating your view.
The atomic bombing of Japan didn't happen today, it happened nearly 80 years ago. Plenty of people consider it a war crime to this day, and plenty of people excuse it, but it's difficult to be horrified by events old enough to barely exist within living memory.
80 years are not so far in time for me as I recently realized that when I was born I was closer to the end of the war than my current age. That made me feel somehow more connected to that past event than to the present.
While the horror of the atomic bombings of civilian centers is more obvious in hindsight, it also overshadows what was at least equally horrific at the time: the continuous and deliberate widespread fire bombings of civilian centers.
Much of what the US did in Japan would be considered a war crime if it happened nowadays. The Pacific campaign also heavily leveraged existing racist sentiments and explicitly dehumanized Asian people which carried over into the Korean War (where the US did manage to commit more war crimes than either of the two Koreas) and the Vietnam War.
This isn't to excuse Japan who to this day refuse to acknowledge the Rape of Nanjing and is orthogonal to the legitimacy of US involvement in the Korean and Vietnamese civil wars (the former of which explicitly contradicted a UN decision and presented a last-ditch effort to avoid an imminent North Korean victory). Japan was the aggressor and did horrible war crimes themselves. But that doesn't mean everything the US did was above the board and it doesn't excuse it. Opinions are still divided on the firebombing of Dresden and even by its most exaggerated retellings it pales in comparison to what happened in Japan.
Also what the article doesn't go out of its way to mention but implies: the atomic bombings were part of what led to the Japanese surrender but did not play the critical part Truman would later claim they did (while continously exaggerating the number of American lives saved by it over the years). The Soviet invasion and risk of annexation played a far greater part and surrendering to the US to stop the Soviet advance was preferable to a Soviet annexation that would have at best meant a guaranteed deposition of the Emperor if not an execution.
The Japanese Emperor was considered divine. Although the surrender ended up being unconditional the US did not hold him personally responsible and allowed him to remain in a ceremonial function. If there were no off-the-record agreements about this, it was at least a leap of faith with the understanding that the alternative was not an American occupation but guaranteed annexation by the Soviets who were known to not look too kindly on kings, gods or the territorial integrity of Japan (given the Russo-Japanese war preceding WW2). The US wasn't keen on risking the lives of its soldiers by invading the deathtrap that was mainland Japan whereas the Soviets had a reputation (accurate or not) of not fearing meatgrinders.
>This isn't to excuse Japan who to this day refuse to acknowledge the Rape of Nanjing
I have often heard that Japan denies or has never apologized for it's actions in China / Korea but there are numerous apologies that have been given. I think this is often repeated to both paint Japanese people as uncaring and also keep divisions between Japanese, Chinese and Korean people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_war_apology_statements...
>On August 15, 1995, the fiftieth anniversary of the Surrender of Japan, the Japanese prime minister Tomiichi Murayama gave the first formal apology for Japanese actions during the war.[171]
>He offered his apology to all survivors and to the relatives and friends of the victims. That day, the prime minister and the Japanese Emperor Akihito pronounced statements of mourning at Tokyo's Nippon Budokan. Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanjing, criticized Murayama for not providing the written apology that had been expected. She said that the people of China "don't believe that an... unequivocal and sincere apology has ever been made by Japan to China" and that a written apology from Japan would send a better message to the international community.[172]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre
The allegation isn't that they denied or never apologized for "Japan's actions in China/Korea". The allegation is that they don't acknowledge the Rape of Nanjing (or the crimes of Unit 731).
Imagine Germany had at numerous times apologized for WW2 and "the actions committed" without ever explicitly acknowledging the Holocaust, the mass murders in Poland and other annexed territories and so on.
Without explicitly acknowledging what Japan had done in Nanjing (or what Unit 731 had done as "experiments"), an apology means nothing. It's the difference between apologizing for a war and for the war crimes committed during that war. It implies that everything that happened can simply be paraphrased as "actions during wartime", which understates the extent of the heinousness of the crimes.
> However, Mariana Budjeryn, a Ukrainian scholar at Harvard argued that the denuclearization of Ukraine was not a mistake and that it was unclear whether Ukraine would be better off as a nuclear state. She argued that the deterrent value of the nuclear weapons in Ukraine was questionable. While Ukraine had "administrative control" of the weapons delivery systems, it would have needed 12 to 18 months to establish full operational control, and Ukraine would have faced sanctions from the West and likely retaliation from Russia. Moreover, Ukraine had no nuclear weapons program and would have struggled to replace nuclear weapons once their service life expired. Instead, by agreeing to give up the nuclear weapons, Ukraine received financial compensations and the security assurances of the Budapest Memorandum.[29]
12 months seems like a plenty of time for US/Russia to come and take back the nukes.
> Is it just me, or should we be way more horrified by the fact that the US dropped atomic bombs on civilians?
What was the alternative?
The Japanese leadership knew for a year from their own internal reports that they couldn't win the war, and simply want to grind down US resolve. Imperial Japan wanted the following conditions:
* Emperor stays on throne
* Japan gets to keep territory
* any allegation of (e.g.) war crimes would be dealt with internally by the Japanese themselves
Would it be okay for Nazi Germany to surrender if:
* Hitler and the Nazis got to stay in government
* Germany got to keep Czechoslovakia, Poland, etc
* war crime allegations would be dealt by the Nazis themselves
The first bomb was dropped on August 6. The Japanese War Cabinet held a meeting on August 9 to discuss the situation, and decided not to surrender as they didn't think the US could create more bombs. So even after the first bomb was dropped, they wouldn't surrender.
In the middle of the meeting they learned of the second bomb, which was dropped that morning.
The War Cabinet was split 3-3 on whether to surrender. After the second bomb.
They called in the full cabinet to discuss things. The full cabinet was split. After the second bomb.
They called in the Emperor at that point, and he said to end the war. Though in his announcement that was broadcast over the radio, the word "surrender" was never used:
Seriously: what was the alternative? Invade the main islands (Operation Downfall)? What would have been the US casualties? What would have been the Japanese civilian casualties? Or blockade Japan and starve them?
We only consider the killing of civilians a crime when it's committed by those we define as our enemies.
Replace Hiroshima with a hypothetical New York and ask your question again. Do you see an alternative to nuking of a hypothetical New York to win a war?
There's a very good case to be made that the primary motivation to use the atomic weapons was the fact that they existed ..
developed at very great expense for a European War that no longer existed, Germany having surrended when the weapons were finally complete - with only one test on a tower in a desert the military side wanted a real world 'battlefield' test and there was already an ongoing campaign to destroy each and every major and minor target in Japan (much much cheaper per city) using conventional HE & firebombs.
Well, instead of reading that article, I have already read the book that it references, Prompt and Utter Destruction: Truman and the Use of Atomic Bombs Against Japan:
It goes through the timeline of the events, including who knew what, at what point.
Given Japanese intransigence (and their 'counter-demands'), the experiences of Okinawa, etc, I don't see any reasonable alternatives—unless you think a bloodbath of Allied soldiers and Japanese civilians is reasonable:
If Japan was not willing to surrender after one bomb, and barely decided to surrender after two, what makes you think they'd surrender with zero bombs dropped?
Truman's first priority was to the US people. If bombing Japan achieved peace faster, and thus reduced US casualties, why wouldn't he take that option?
Seriously: what is the counter-factual event in what the US/Allies should have done with Japan? Invade? Blockade/starve? Not go for unconditional surrender? Other? What is (was) the alternative?
And I'm aware of the author of the article, Wellerstein, having read his book Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States. He's also the creator of the Nukemap website:
> It references many books, with a number of different viewpoints and arguments.
It references Walker and Alperovitz. I'll be sure to add Alperovitz to my reading list.
> You've read a single book with a single viewpoint.
I said I have read Walker. I have not said I've read only Walker.
> There's a breadth of informed opinion on the matter; the article you haven't read outlines a number of them.
By "number of" do you mean "two": Walker and the "consensus" / "traditional" view, and Alperovitz and the (so-called) "revisionist" view. (Kuznick is mentioned in passing at the very end.)
Walker is well aware of the ambiguity of the situation; from an interview:
> One argument has been made by the scholar Richard Frank, and I find it wonderfully convincing. Richard makes the argument – going back to the atomic bomb versus the Soviet invasion – he says that the bomb was essential to convince Hirohito to surrender. But that it was the Soviet invasion that convinced the generals of all those armies in China and other parts of East Asia to surrender. Because there was genuine concern, both among American officials and Japanese officials, that the emperor’s order to surrender would not be obeyed by generals in East Asia, who had huge armies and who could’ve fought on for a very long time at enormous cost to everybody. Richard makes the argument that once the Soviets came in, then the generals out in the field, who were outraged by the idea of surrendering, knew they couldn’t defeat the Soviets. So they went along with it. It’s a very interesting argument that I think makes a very sensible separation of what the impact of the bomb was and the impact of the Soviet invasion.
> Walker: […] Those are the positions. And as I, and a lot of others, argue – I’m certainly not alone – they’re both seriously flawed. The traditional view because Truman did not face a stark choice between the bomb and an invasion. The invasion was not going to begin until on or around November 1, and a lot of could’ve happened between August and November of 1945. Also the view that if an invasion had been necessary, it would’ve cost hundreds of thousands of lives: there’s simply no contemporaneous evidence that supports that argument. It was made after the war as a means to justify the use of the bomb against a really small number of critics, who in the late ‘40s, early ‘50s, were saying that perhaps the bomb wasn’t necessary. It’s also beyond question that the invasion was not inevitable. I mean, the idea that Truman had to use the bomb because if he didn’t the only other option was an invasion is simply wrong. So, the traditional view in its pure form, that Truman used the bomb to avoid an invasion, simply doesn’t hold up.
> Kelly: In the view of the revisionists.
> Walker: No, in the view of those of us who are somewhere in between. What I argue is that Truman used the bomb for the reasons he said he did, to end the war as quickly as possible. No one in a position of authority or knowledge, and certainly not his chief and military advisors, told him in the summer of 1945 that if you don’t use the bomb, an invasion is inevitable and it’s going to cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Estimates for lives lost that were projected by military experts in the summer of 1945 were far less than that, and the numbers are far from hard evidence. But there’s no evidence whatsoever that he was ever told that hundreds of thousands of lives would be the cost of an invasion of Japan. That was something that came about later.
> My argument is that Truman didn’t have to be told that an invasion would cost hundreds of thousands of lives. He knew it was going to cost a lot of lives, tens of thousands, if an invasion was necessary. He also knew that even without an invasion, the war was still going on. Okinawa had been defeated in late June of 1945, so we had one month when there weren’t any major battlefronts between the end of the Battle of Okinawa and the end of the war, which is July 1945.
> In that month, about 775 American soldiers and Marines were killed in combat. About another 2,300 or 2,400 died from other causes, disease, wounds, accidents, whatever. So, you had 3,000 soldiers and Marines who were killed in the month of July of 1945 without any major battlefronts.
> You also had sailors being killed. The sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis occurred July 28 [misspoke: July 30], 1945, just a horrific event, in which a Japanese submarine attacked and sank the U.S.S. Indianapolis. Of the 1100 [misspoke: 1200] crewmembers, 880 died, either from the explosion of the ship or were stranded in water for a very long time and either died from exposure or from sharks. Just a horrific story.
> As long as the war was going on, that was going to happen, and that’s what Truman and his advisors were concerned about. No one had to tell them that the alternative to using the bomb was saving far fewer lives. That number of 3,200 or 3,300 who died in July, that’s just soldiers and Marines, so you have sailors on top of that. That was plenty of reason to use the bomb if it had a chance to end the war as quickly as possible.
I think when the atomic bombs were dropped Japan basically didnt have any means of defense. I think nuking a country that is defenseless is probably evil even if in their hearts they are unwilling to accept unconditional surrender (this last point is even in contention).
The Japanese took 'too long' to surrender, so by the time they contacted the US government on August 14th, because of communication delays the sorties had already gone out early August 15th and dropped their payloads:
> About a week after V-J Day, I was one of a small group of scientists and engineers interrogating an intelligent, well-informed Japanese Army officer in Yokohama. We asked him what, in his opinion, would have been the next major move if the war had continued. He replied: "You would probably have tried to invade our homeland with a landing operation on Kyushu about November 1. I think the attack would have been made on such and such beaches."
> "Could you have repelled this landing?" we asked, and he answered: "It would have been a very desperate fight, but I do not think we could have stopped you."
> "What would have happened then?" we asked.
> He replied: "We would have kept on fighting until all Japanese were killed, but we would not have been defeated," by which he meant that they would not have been disgraced by surrender.
> "At this stage of the war, the lack of modern weaponry and ammunition meant that most were armed with swords or even bamboo spears."
So basically defenseless. I understand that your opinion is that at the time they did not think of themselves as defenseless but this actually doesnt matter to me in the moral claims. The fact is that they were defenseless and we nuked them twice. We nuke them because we wanted to test these weapons and AFAIK the USA kept these cities from bombing raids in order to test the effectiveness of the weapons.
Also the Japanese being 'too long' to surrender because they were not a well organized fighting force by that time. I think it was days before they even understood what happened in Hiroshima.
and to address your edit:
The irony is that we actually gave them what they wanted. The wanted to keep the emperor and we caved.
> Is it just me, or should we be way more horrified by the fact that the US dropped atomic bombs on civilians?
First Japan was allied with nazi Germany. And nazi Germany was putting jews, handicapped people, romanians, gays, etc. into crematoriums, alive. These weren't soldiers either.
Second Japan did the Pearl Harbor attack: up until then the US was still a neutral country in WWII.
There were many ways to not get at war in the US. Those two weren't among them. What was the US supposed to do? Not drop the bomb and let Russia annihilate and conquer Japan?
These two atomic bombs were horrible but during WWII the US pretty much single handedly saved (most of) the world from both nazism and stalinism.
I'm not saying the US have always been acting in good faith lately but during WWII I'm not sure the US can be faulted much.
Put it another way: a world war vs fucking evil incarnate is messy.
Not a lot of nuance in your view of the U.S. role in WWII.
For example, your point:
> Japan did the Pearl Harbor attack: up until then the US was still a neutral country in WWII.
The U.S. Export Control Act (July 1940), freezing of Japanese assets (July 1941) and then the oil embargo (August 1941) are examples of some of the nuance I see.
The US did those things in response to Imperial Japan's invasion, occupation, and looting of other Asian nations. No nuance is needed; Japan was the aggressor pure and simple.
Nobody would ever defend the Nazis as victims yet people come out of the woodwork to defend Imperial Japan, their brutal attempt at colonialism, and the equivalent holocaust they committed. As I've said before, the Japanese sure got good marketing after the war.
Who's defending Imperial Japan? Nuance just means recognizing that actors on both sides were participants in the build up. I dislike the wholesale excusing of one sides actions because the other side was worse.
Given that Imperial Japan was so awful I'm wondering how far you would allow the U.S. to go? How about if the U.S. rounded up all Japanese Americans and put them in camps? Also completely okay, I guess, because Imperial Japan.
No country is blameless in war and the United States is no exception, but there is no reasonable comparison between the evil Japan committed in Asia and what the United States did to Japanese Americans.
When you repeat the justification that the Japanese government used for going to war with the US more or less verbatim without explaining the background, well, that would be you, sir.
> "I dislike the wholesale excusing of one sides actions because the other side was worse."
That's not a moral or principled stance. That's just whataboutism.
> "Given that Imperial Japan was so awful I'm wondering how far you would allow the U.S. to go?"
You seem to be looking for an answer to paint me in a bad light and I'm feeling magnanimous today so I'll oblige you: like most Asians other than the Japanese, I see no moral problem with either the atomic bombings or the firebombings of Japanese cities in WW2.
I am white but I have been told by my (Taiwanese) manager that, "All Asian's hate the Japanese." I know only a little of the history of Japan and its neighbors but he assured me there is a long history of Japan being the aggressor behind this sentiment.
I don't feel like I'm trying to paint you in a bad light, rather hoping you'll concede that one side doesn't get a free pass if the other does something atrocious.
Perhaps it was my having been raised a Quaker during a formative period of my life, but an eye for an eye is quite the opposite of my philosophy.
>100,000 civilians killed instantly and an additional 130,000 died from the exposure afterwards and till this day no official excuse from the US.
With all due respect to the enormous civilian suffering behind yours and the following numbers, why should there be an official excuse other than the obvious of winning the war against a barbaric enemy that had already ferociously invaded most of eastern Asia, the western Pacific and ruthlessly killed over 15 million people in the process?
The atomic bombings, by the perspective of the time and what had already been done, weren't even so terrible in terms of dead. The mass firebombing campaigns of the entire last couple years of the war against Japanese cities, using completely conventional weapons, had already killed possibly as many as 700,000 people with hardly any allied leader batting an eye, or the U.S. public for that matter. Given this mentality, and the subsequent lack of an apology for those conventional bombings, what would have made the atomic bombings deeply unique? (except for the nature of the bombs themselves).
Let's not also forget that Japan itself did everything possible to make the use of atomic bombs seem reasonable, having promised repeatedly that it would fight even in the face of horrendous casualties both for its own people and the forces of any invading army. Given the absolutist stance of Japanese forces in the field previous to those last weeks, fighting until every last man is dead and killing as many civilians as they could in the process, on directives and mentalities instilled directly from Tokyo, it's not hard to see why the Americans took seriously the idea of an unimaginable bloodbath in any potential invasion of the home islands.
Just look at the battles of Okinawa, in which the local forces encouraged their own local civilians to commit mass suicide as they lost the island, or the battle of Manilla, in which the knowingly losing Japanese just kept fighting, butchering, raping and burning the city solely for the sake of doing so.
Yes, but the people making those threats aren't the people who were killed. As you yourself say, they were civilians; and they certainly weren't in Manilla.
So were those in Tokyo and the other 72 cities levelled in bombing campaigns on Japanese homeland prior to the two additional cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
But i'm not sure what your point is. If you're referring to the tragedy of those civilians killed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it's grotesque, but how is it different from the tragedy of million of civilians killed by the Empire during its conquests, or the hundreds of thousands of civilians killed by the U.S. bombing raids with conventional weapons before the nuclear bombs were dropped, or most crucially, the possibly millions of civilians and soldiers who could have been killed if the American forces had directly invaded?
Under the lack of foresight at the time, and given the nature of Japanese belligerence, it's not hard to understand why the U.S decided to drop the two atom bombs, given what they'd already done while still facing Japanese intransigence. Maybe it wasn't the most moral of choices, but under the circumstances, it had an understandable logic of hardened pragmatism that it's too easy to sweep under a rug of condemnation today with foresight, which itself might be mistaken even now.
Possibly the best book that I have ever read. It deals with many of the issues raised in the comments here, and with politics, industrial development, economics, military capabilities, and the history of modern physics.
Rhodes also wrote "'Dark Sun: The Making of the Hydrogen Bomb', which told the story of the atomic espionage during World War II, the debates over whether the hydrogen bomb ought to be produced, and the eventual creation of the bomb and its consequences for the arms race." Also impeccable
Info: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Making_of_the_Atomic_Bomb