Why Color Atom Bomb Footage of Hiroshima & Nagasaki Was Censored by the Government for Decades
Back in October 2005, I wrote up an "Artifact" for Reason magazine (for the uninitiated, we call our feature on the last page of each issue Artifact; it consists of an image and a short text). Called "War's Nightmare Landscape," it's worth recalling today especially:
This horrifying image shows a young boy scarred by the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki in August 1945. Almost unbelievably, he would not only survive, but live into the 21st century.
The U.S. military shot miles of color film documenting the effects of atomic bombs on residents of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then classified the footage as secret and locked it away until the 1980s. On the 60th anniversary of the dropping of the Bomb, the Sundance Channel ran the documentary Original Child Bomb, which brought some of the long-suppressed images to a wide audience for the first time. That same month, in response to legal action taken by the watchdog group the National Security Archive, the Pentagon released several dozen uncensored photos of flag-draped coffins of troops killed in Iraq and Afghanistan and agreed to comply "as expeditiously as possible" with future Freedom of Information Act requests for images of casualties.
If you can stand to search for it in the melted flesh of the boy's back, you may find the reason why all governments try to conceal the human costs of war. Even on those rare occasions when the cause is unambiguously just, such images represent a blurred, nightmare landscape in which easy patriotism disappears.
That was written as the United States was mired in the thick of two wars, one of which (Iraq) was sold to the public on doubly dubious arguments. The first was that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, which turned out not to be true (as I argued back in 2002, even if it were true, the invasion of Iraq was best understood as a non sequitur in the "war on terror"). The second was that Iraq could be pacified on the cheap (lest we forget, Bush admin hand Larry Lindsey was sacked for suggesting that Iraq could cost as much as $200 billion, or double what the administration had suggested—and less than a fifth of what Iraq and Afghanistan have cost so far).
I don't think that there is any way to make a clean and easy evaluation regarding the moral or strategic righteousness of dropping the Bomb on Japan, but I do think it's an ongoing debate that is necessary and proper in any country that strives to be either moral or righteous. And the recognition that governments routinely and systematically lie about the causes, costs, and casualties of war—remember that image above and miles of color film of the aftermath of atomic bombs were hidden by the government for decades—is something that needs to be built into every calculation to send troops into harm's way. "Even on those rare occasions when the cause is unambiguously just," as I wrote seven years ago.
Related: Information about the boy in the picture, Sumiteru Taniguchi, who is still alive.
Lucy Steigerwald reflects on "Some Reminders of the Cost of Ending World War II."
Wikipedia has a page that is a good starting point for further inquiry into the continuing controversy over the dropping of A-bombs on Japan here.
Streaming video of Alain Resnais' 1955 film, "Night and Fog," a brilliant and haunting meditation on genocide, war, and the mixed desires to forget and remember horror. And the start of his 1959 movie, Hiroshima Mon Amour,
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Fission!
Whenever I see these documentaries, two things strike me. Of course the wounds were horrible – heat, explosion, and radiation. On the other hand many of the victims who didn’t die of their wounds went on to live long productive lives.
This guy managed to be in Hiroshima AND Nagasaki on the wrong days – and lived to 93.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsutomu_Yamaguchi
I hope we never resort to unrestricted warfare on civilians again – but I don’t see any moral difference between using bayonets, fire-bombs, or atomic weapons.
Yeah, but he’s Japanese, the world’s longest-lived people. Just think, if he wasn’t exposed to the atomic radiation, he could have lived to 193.
As it is, we’re lucky he didn’t mutate into a giant atomic fire breathing salaryman who swam the Pacific and destroyed Los Angeles.
but I don’t see any moral difference between using bayonets, fire-bombs, or atomic weapons.
ERROR LINE 735
Start checking your moral code there.
I dunno. Incinerating Tokyo and Dresden was as reprehensible as nuking them would have been, and I suppose that lining up all the inhabitants of those cities and bayoneting them would have been too.
If Japan had won at Midway do you doubt that they’d have eventually tried to incincerate San Francisco?
The enemy is immoral, therefore we must be too? Is that the argument being put forth here?
The enemy is immoral, therefore we must be too? Is that the argument being put forth here?
All is fair in love and war.
Seriously, if you’re willing to murder someone for whatever your cause is, I don’t think you should even bother asking how you’re going to murder them, because it’s just a waste of time. “Oh boo hoo, he bombed me rather than nuked me.”
All is fair in love and war.
Cool. This means you get to drop napalm on the ex’s house.
Shut the fuck up.
Warty, you cannot state that without linking to this.
Actually yes. I highly doubt they ever would have attempted the idiotic task of assaulting the US mainland, even if they did have Nuclear weapons.
Honestly it is debatable whether they would have attempted to take control of Hawaii had they eliminated the US fleet in the first few months of the war. More likely they would have blocaded it and used the threat of invading it with maybe some targeted bombings of naval facilities on the Pacific Coast as leverage to get the US to sue for peace while they consolidated their hold on the rest of their empire.
I suppose if that didn’t work and they developed a nuke before we did they might have dropped it on someplace like Portland or Seattle to further prod our surrender (with of course the threat that San Francisco and Los Angeles are next) but realistically that would have been about it.
They invaded the Aleutians.
Hawaii would have been a great forward base as well.
I think you’re also conflating current thinking when you describe targeted bombings. What Japanese discretion during WWII would lead you to believe they would hold back if given a chance.
Since we’re refighting WW2, (always a fun hobby) I think it more likely the Japanese would have used any hypothetical nuclear weapon against the Chinese, not the U.S. China was what was occupying insane amounts of men and materiel.
Much easier for the Japanese to get it to a Chinese target than an American one, by the time they could have reasonably obtained it. I cannot see the Japanese realistically invading the mainland U.S., and even supporting a Hawaiian invasion would have taxed their logistics to the limit. But I think it possible they, upon a decisive victory at Midway, could have done to Pearl what the USN ended up doing to Rabaul and Truk.
Would the U.S. have cut a deal in that case? Say, an armistice along with return of some/all conquered U.S. territories? I don’t know, but I don’t think it’s an open and shut, “Of course not.”
They did try to bomb the US mainland through small bombs carried by baloons. Little-known fact but true. One of them was found somewhere east of CA. Now imagine they had the capability to park a carrier 20 miles off the coast.
And take control of is different than incinerate. I also do not doubt they had no interest in attempting an invasion of the US mainland, as opposed to fire bombing it.
As you note, the Japanese certainly had some…esoteric…methods for bombarding the U.S. mainland. Ironically, Tojo, of all people, is the one who is cited as stopping the balloon payloads from being biological weapons. [Link goes into the activities of Unit 731 and the proposed delivery methods for the biological weapons they developed and tested. It is not for the squeamish. Naturally, the U.S. gave many of the leaders immunity, in exchange for sharing their research.]
The best bet of delivering an incinerating payload to the U.S. mainland, IMHO, would be to load it within a submarine and sail it as close to the target as possible. You run the risk of losing the boat en route, as happened to the plague-carrying sub that was to have been used against Saipan, per the second link, but it’s still their most likely method of transporting the bomb.
The U.S. had to build the world’s largest bomber in order to carry the atomic bomb, a project larger than the Manhattan Project, IIRC. There’s no way the Japanese could have flown a six ton, hypothetical atomic bomb to the U.S.
Gray Ghost, I had not seen that info. Thanks (I think) for the link. How horrible.
Um, with the technology that existed at the time even if they had sunk every ship in the navy they would not have been capable of parking a carrier anywhere within 200 miles of the US mainland coast. Simply put a carrier with 60 or so light weight aircraft could not stand against a ground based airforce of hundreds of heavier armed and longer range ground based aircraft
Hawaii is an obvious command post to take over to control the Pacific. The US West Coast would have been avoided as too costly to take and too unlikely to win.
I can do this all day…The A-bomb discussion has always fascinated me. Morally there is no excuse for incinerating thousands of non-combatant (even innocent) civilians in a blanket military attack. Re-hashing the “millions of lives were saved vs. the no they weren’t strikes me as less relevant than the lesson we should take away. Which is this type of action should ALWAYS be condemned.
Perhaps you can explain it to me.
Seriously? You need to have the difference between a bayonet and a nuclear device explained to you?
So, the moral difference lies in the amount of people killed at one time by the instrument? (Serious question)
That and who it’s used on.
A bayonet, a rifle, and hand grenade are all personal devices, designed to be used up close. Except in certain situations, you see your enemy up close and perform the kill yourself. The soldier himself chooses the application and experiences the event on a very person level. The morality or immorality of his actions can’t be avoided at that level.
Sure, any of these can be used on a non-combatant, and it’s just as wrong then, except when you bayonet someone, you don’t kill 99,999 others. But at the end of the day, a bayonet or a rifle is a weapon designed for one-on-one combat and for use on the enemy’s soldiers, not civilians.
So the Rape of Nanking was better since it was soldiers bayoneting women and children?
Oh yes, it was much better. The victims thanked them as they were being killed.
All I can do is shake my head when I see this level of fucknuttery pretzel logic at work to defend the atrocities committed by the state in war.
I have pretzel logic? I’m not trying to rank the morality of different inanimate objects.
soldiers bayoneting women and children
Don’t forget the torture, medical experiments and biological warfare! Good times.
Kind of depends on how you are killed by them. Being vaporized in an instant might be a better way to go than dying from sepsis because somebody shoved six inches of steel in your guts. Or you could compare someone stabbed in the heart with slowly dying of radiation poisoning.
One ought to consider the time element in one’s suffering matrix, I guess.
Yes I’m serious.
It’s pretty hard to accidentally take out civilians (including children) with bayonets. When it does happen (like in the Rape of Nanking) I would agree that it’s morally equivalent, but certainly firebombing and nuclear weapons are far more destructive to people who never agreed to be a part of the conflict.
Sure, however, the participants in WWII including the Japanese had crossed that threshold into “unlimited warfare” before the U.S. even entered the war.
Both cities were producing materials for the Japanese war effort, which at the time was sufficient cause for attention from the Air Force.
Both cities were producing materials for the Japanese war effort, which at the time was sufficient cause for attention from the Air Force.
When you dehumanize war, anything is possible.
Every house in each city was producing munitions? Not just certain factories or sectors? A 6-year old child is just as guilty as the soldier who pulls the trigger or the general who draws up the battle plans?
Ah, we should have used laser-guided smart bombs to pick off those small targets and avoid collateral damage. Oh, wait, it was 1945.
There is no difference, either way you are dead.
What do people think, that the allies were going to invade the island with flowers in their guns?
At least as many Japanese people were killed by conventional bombing than by nuclear bombs. Compare and contrast.
Without the nuclear bombs, millions would have died in the invasion. That would be more moral?
See below.
That’s the thing. The motrailty of nuking civilian populations has been reduced to “we firebombed Dresden and Tokyo!” and “the other side would do it too!”
The invasion was going to happen. Nothing could stop it short of unconditional surrender by Japan, and only the bomb could make that happen.
How is it more immoral to drop nuclear bombs vs. destroying those same cities and many more with conventional weapons, followed by an invasion that kills millions?
This guy managed to be in Hiroshima AND Nagasaki on the wrong days
“oohhh WHAT THE FUCK, seriously, again?!?!?!”
If you ever watch the (to me) cool/horrifying documentary The Atomic Cafe there is a Japanese guy who (it is implied) gets nuked at Hiroshima and then later gets nuked again during World War III (the footage got recycled, of course). I always call him the unluckiest guy in the world.
You are a “half-empty” kind of person, aren’t you. I have always thought of that guy as the luckiest man in the world. He survived TWO nuclear explosions!
The only moral difference is the possibility of collateral damage.
I agree with the author that we must always be aware of and discuss the consequences of war. WWII and the dropping of the Atomic bombs are not sympathetic places to start. Even the Japanese acknowledge that more lives would have been lost had we not used the bombs. Truthfully, injuries during war are ugly, disfiguring, and horrifying regardless of the war methods used. The dropping of these bombs were not taken lightly there has been much written about how heavily this decision weighed on those who were responsible for this decision. Focusing on the atomic bomb can also have the effect of causing people to discount the injuries created by non-atomic warfare. We need to avoid that trap. A better focus would be on injuries suffered by civilians and troops in Iraq and Afganistan. Why? These have multiple causes, can’t be attributed to a weapon used only once (in warfare), and will create a greater awareness of the true costs of war (physically, mentally, and financially).
but I do think it’s an ongoing debate that is necessary and proper in any country that strives to be either moral or righteous.
Which country is that?
They were the aggressors, which makes them little more than animals needing to be put down. You know that. And arithmetic makes everything moral.
Too bad we didn’t have nukes in 1863. That would make these discussions much more interesting.
Too bad we didn’t have nukes in 1863. That would make these discussions much more interesting.
A very interesting point. I will be thinking of this in days to come, thanks!
Yep, the South would have won! We did have the best generals.
Lincoln (when he wasn’t hunting vampires or axing zombies) was pushing Union scientists to complete a time-travel pod so he could go to the future and get nukes for Sherman to speed up the destruction of the South, but Lee sent a volunteer to farther in the future to build a terminator robot to send back to the 1860s to destroy the Union scientists’ work.
Add some circumcision talk too.
Deep Dish vs. Thin Crust.
I like the way you think. Combining a Hiroshima discussion with this commentariat’s love of refighting the Civil War should easily push the comment total over 1000.
I was wondering more of just how bloodthirsty our nuclear armchair generals would be when it came to nuking Savannah or Richmond and not them Jap savages.
I’m ok with nuking Richmond. That city is a shithole; plus, it’s close enough to DC to scare the congresscritters away from work.
And I was going to suggest Boston, with Fenway as the primary target.
To be fair, Boston should be nuked regardless of whether you’re from the north or south.
Fenway in summer. There are few places I’d rather be, except perhaps Good Harbor Beach.
Hate it all you want, there’s more for me.
How many bars of solid gold is a ticket for the bleachers at Fenway nowadays? And after that, how can you afford a Italian sausage and beer?
Well let’s see – if a bar of gold is one ounce, and an ounce is going for about $1,600, then a bleacher seat is approximately 1.8 hundreths of an ounce?
Yes, let’s roll the Hiroshima, Civil War, abortion and gold standard threads into one.
Detroit…ain’t nothing there anyway. Toom few ppl. in N. England, no one would notice if it disappeared of the map (See “Diamonds are Forever” and a reference to Kansas by Blofeld)
If you nuked Detroit, how could we tell?
Carthage?
Fucking Carthage?
I see your “Carthage” and raise you a Troy!
From a military point of view, was using the bomb necessary? One hears about “a million allied casualties and millions more Japanese if ‘we’ had to invade Japan.” By this calculus, the deaths caused by the A bombs was magnitudes less. However, was an invasion necessary?
The Navy’s submarines had already knocked out about 90% of the Japanese merchant fleet. Concentrating our u-boats around Japan could have starved them out in short order. One of the bombs could have been dropped in Tokyo harbor, with little loss of life, as a demonstration. Yes, it took two bombs to convince the Japanese high command and the U.S. only had two. So if one used as demonstration didn’t convince, then the U.S. could have used the blockade as time to
build many more, and eventually put on a few more demonstrations.
From a military perspective, I don’t see why using the bombs on cities was necessary.
I think part of the reason was to impress the Soviets.
We had to end the war in the Pacific theater quick as the Soviets were gearing up for their own invasion of Japan. A North Japan/South Japan situation would have been even more fucked up.
You are assuming a very war-weary America would have sat still for this kid-gloves treatment, even after the Kamikazes, Okinawa, and Iowa Jima showed just how far Japan was going to take things.
Not that it would have been any more humane to use your approach, as you appear to acknowledge that the blockade would have effectively starved many Japanese to death.
Starved them out?
Um, this is not some walled city we’re talking about but an entire country more than capable of growing it’s own food.
Sure we could have prevented them from getting access to the supplies necessary to rebuild their military for as long as we felt like blocaiding them, but given the casualties they had already sustained they could have gone on happily feeding themselves while maintaining sufficient readiness to make an invasion REALLY costly for both sides for literally decades if not forever.
Also part of the demonstration that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were was to show that not only did we have the means to kill every Japaneese citizen if necessary, but that we had the will to do so. Dropping the bombs on the Harbor where they would have killed no one (at least initially, radiation would have killed some) would have only demonstrated half of that message and allowed their leadership to go on thinking they had a reason to go on fighting.
Rasilio, you might want to investigate some of the resources describing, e.g., Operation Starvation and projections from Admiral King’s staff, of Japanese civilian famine deaths over 1945 and 1946. They dwarf the toll from the atomic bombings. IIRC, the 1945-1946 winter was even worse than projected—it certainly was in Europe—which would have exacerbated the situation.
As it was, average Japanese caloric intake declined by 15% from pre-war totals, from 2000 calories per day to 1680. [Strategic Bombing Survey, Pacific War, pg 93-94 in this reprinting As this was an average, and most shipments were prioritized for the military and vital civilian workers, the plight of the ordinary Japanese was much worse. Their overall readiness to repel an Allied invasion may not have been degraded, as you propose, but that would have come at a truly hideous loss of civilian lives.
So you have a country with what 25 million civilians and 200k of them starve each of the first 5 years of the blockaid following which they start to recover and stabilize their food distribution and growing (since you know they aren’t shipping it anywhere else anymore) leaving them 24 million civilians. That is hardly “starving them out”
North Korea has been surviving in similar situations for more than 50 years and that is my point (which you conceed and the end of your response).
We had 4 options in 1945….
1) Use Nukes
2) Invade
3) Blockade and wait for them to surrender
Option 2 would have killed at least half a million Japaneese and at least 100k Americans. Option 3 would have lasted decades and likely have killed a few million Japaneese in the process. That leaves only option 1 as a chance to get out with minimal casualties
I think we are agreeing, mostly. Given the three options and the political pressures in the U.S. at the time, I think Option #1 is the only realistic one. FWIW, the Strategic Bombing Survey writers’ opinion was that Japan would have surrendered due to the blockade/B-29 mining by November, perhaps early 1946. Somewhere between their estimates and your’s of decades is where the truth would fall, I think. Certainly the IJA survived and maintained the ability to resist invasion on islands where disease and privation—including outright cannibalism—were responsible for 25 percent and greater casualties.
I do think the starvation rate would have been higher than the less than 1 percent you cite. Much higher. Holodormor/Great Leap Forward levels of starvation. Even in Bengal or Indochina, “milder” famines in 1943-44 and 1944-45 respectively were responsible for the deaths of 2-4 million (out of 60M) and .5-2M (out of ~20M?). IMHO, the Japanese famine would have been worse.
There were still lots of Japanese in China, doing seriously nasty stuff to the Chinese people. Even if the Japanese had been unable to cross back and forth across the China Sea, the Japanese military forces already in China could have survived, and oppressed the Chinese, for a long, long time.
Hmm, sustaining a fleet deployed across the pacific ocean for a year or more. Sounds like fun! Oh wait, fun’s not the word for that.
Japan’s organized military was decimated, which is why this meme that Japan was about surrender gains traction. Unfortunately, the military had trained and expected civilians to be human kamikazes in the event of an invasion, and a starvation blockade wouldn’t have made them surrender either.
Even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the nutjobs in the military brass almost succeeded in overruling the emperor and purging the dissenters from the top. Without Hiroshima and Nagasaki breaking the spirit of about half the military brass in realizing it was pointless to continue, the hawks would have kept control and would have subjected the entire country to harakiri.
On my first visit to the U.S. Air Force Museum in Dayton I entered the WWII exhibit and saw a B29 on display. Very large, very impressive. Upon reading it’s plaque I found that it is Bock’s Car, the plane that dropped the Bomb on Nagasaki. Very stunning and sobering.
Years ago, I visited Garber in Silver Hill, MD when they still had the Enola Gay disassembled for restoration and off to the side. I snuck an extended touch when no one was looking.
I don’t like what it represents, but I can still appreciate its historical significance.
I remember having my mind blown by that plane as an 8-year-old.
Wright-Patt kicks the shit out of the Smithsonian Air and Space museum, too.
Mine was blown as a 49 year old. Also, maybe twelve years ago, I worked in an 8th floor office with a window facing cubicle. Saw two large planes flying east in the distance. They turned north, towards me, and as they got closer I recognized them as a B25 and a B29. Fucking awesome, they were flying to Port Columbus to be on display for a few days. Flown and maintained by the Confederate Air Force. They flew close enough for me to recognize the letter A on the B29’s tail.
They are impressive as hell when they fly overhead. I’ve not seen the B-29 flying, but the B-17 and B-24 are pretty cool, with the droning from those giant radials.
And the funny thing is just how much larger (and louder) modern aircraft are. I saw a B-52 pass low overhead on its way to some 4th of July flyby, and it sounded like the end of the world was at hand. Really weird to see a plane that large, flying that low.
One of the most impressive things I have ever seen was a pilot doing touch and go’s (where they come in for a landing approach, touch the wheels down and then accelerate for immediate take off) with a B-1.
I was about a half a mile away from the runway when I first felt the ground shaking through the steering wheel of my car. As I got closer it literally felt like an earth quake every couple of minutes and then I came around a corner and got a clear view of the runway and there was this HUGE plane almost standing on it’s tail accelerating upwards. It made the F-15e’s I worked on at the time look like gnats but was damn near as agile.
The guy went on doing this for another 15 minutes, touchdown, kick in the afterburners and go, circle the airfield and repeat and every time he took off he’d stand it on it’s tail and kick in the afterburners and it would be like a 4 or 5 on the richter scale earthquake.
When I was in El Paso, the Air Force used to do touch-and-gos with C5s onto the Army Air Field. They flew right over our barracks on the descent in. All day and night, for whatever reason. It was maddening.
My grandfather flew B-29s in WWII. He got to the war too late to actually participate in actual bombing, so he ended up flying food and supplies to Japanese communities after the war.
We’ve come a long way from the days when the well-to-do would set up picnic lunches on the tops of hills to watch the skirmishes in the valleys below.
There’s a hierarchy I suppose in picking targets for military operations. At the top would be the enemy forces, followed by military infrastructure, and followed by military industrial support. Then you get into civil infrastructure (roads and bridges) and civil industry and argiculture which supports the military as well as the general populuation. And finally you have the general population.
As far as I know, targeting the general population on the enemy side has always been an option and not always the last option of invaders.
Dropping the bomb was justifiable in WWII and probably no worse than the German rocket attacks against London or the fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t other options.
Dropping the bomb was justifiable in WWII and probably no worse than the German rocket attacks against London or the fire-bombing of Dresden and Tokyo. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t other options.
That’s the thing. The motrailty of nuking civilian populations has been reduced to “we firebombed Dresden and Tokyo!” and “the other side would do it too!”
Not to quote Bill Bennett (or whomever said it first), but is that what we should really call defining deviancy down?
Don’t forget “but we would have killed more of them if we had invaded!” I love that one.
Math is morality.
And false dichotomies are wisdom.
Then what was your approach to ending the war? Unless I’m missing something you would have parked the entire Pacific fleet off the coast of Japan but forbade any further military action as immoral because civilians would have died. I suppose we then have an endless stand-off with japan and hope not oo many of them starve to death?
There are two seperate questions.
First, are atomic/nuclear weapons ever moral?
Second, were Hirosima and Nagasaki legitimate targets?
I think the answer to question 2 is yes.
I think the answer to question 1 is far from clear.
Second, were Hirosima and Nagasaki legitimate targets?
The entire city and not just the military targets? Is collective guilt OK as along as it’s the enemy?
Is collective guilt OK just because someone is wearing a uniform?
Not all soldiers in war fight. All of them support the fight, though. Are soldiers stationed in the rear a legitimate target? How about a ship that is moving food and other supplies?
Not all soldiers in war fight. All of them support the fight, though. Are soldiers stationed in the rear a legitimate target? How about a ship that is moving food and other supplies?
Yes and yes. Just as civilians working in a munitions plant are a legitimate target.
I’ve made it very clear that my objection is the deliberate targeting of non-combatants and the indiscriminate use of weapons of mass destruction.
Since soldiers in many cases were coerced to fight, how is killing them when they aren’t actively in the process of attacking you any more moral than killing a civilian?
In all of the above situations, international law classifies them as “combatants”. If they were chaplains or medics in uniform, they would be technically “non-combatants”.
If they were chaplains or medics in uniform, they would be technically “non-combatants”.
Correct. Medical units are considered off-limits, even though they are military. Thanks for reminding me of that.
Then the question becomes, how many American Soldiers and Marines lives is your morality worth? Would it be worth your life if you were 19 years old in 1945?
I had family and friends who were in that situation. None of them ever expressed the slightest doubt that it wasn’t the right thing to do.
I get it. Math is morality. As long as the numbers add up, that should count against you at the Pearly Gates.
Gah. That *shouldn’t* count against you.
There is no math involved when you talk to the people actually involved. They didn’t want their friends and family members who had survived bloody battles in the Philippines, Iwo Jima, etc… killed in yet another battle.
They didn’t give a damn about Japan, they wanted to live. Don’t you?
Not to mention the vast numbers of survivors of Europe who would have been shipped to the Pacific for the invasion of Japan. To send hundreds of thousdands of those kids to near certain death when we had a weapon sufficient to win the war would have sparked immense and justifable outrage, as opposed to the arm-chair outrage we’re seeing here, 60 years after the fact.
They literally would have killed Truman when they found out.
So if you had good reason to believe that by bayoneting one measly Japanese baby, you could get the generals and admirals to call off an attack that would have killed–let’s not even say thousands, let’s just say 100 civilians–you should go for it? Or does it really have to be thousands that you save in order to justify bayoneting that one baby?
Is this a baby Hitler quiz?
This. And that the Jap Generals tried to stop the Emporer from surrendering. It’s a shame the bombs had to be dropped, but they had to be dropped.
Actually your target priority list is wrong, at least as far as the US military is concerned. It looks more like this.
1) Enemy Command, Control, Communications, and Intelligence assets
2) Military Infrastructure
3) Transportation Infrastructure
4) Enemy Troops
5) Civil Industry
6) Enemy Agriculture
7) Enemy Civilians
Fact is out military learned long ago that if you take care of 1 – 3 that often you don’t really need to bother with #4 and below because their military tends to just disintegrate. Also fortunately, we have not really needed to target anything below #5 since Vietnam which is nice and it would probably take a major war with China to get us to even go that low on the priority list.
but is that what we should really call defining deviancy down?
Invading armies have used siege tactics to starve target populations into submission for thousands of years. And of course “pillage and rape” is a cliche because it happened so often. The idea that armies shouldn’t target civilians is relatively modern. And I think that is progress.
But unless you’re going to argue that atomic weapons are inherently immoral, I don’t think you have a legitimate argument that comparing Hiroshima and Dresden is defining deviancy downward.
The idea that armies shouldn’t target civilians is relatively modern. And I think that is progress.
I understand that and agree.
But unless you’re going to argue that atomic weapons are inherently immoral, I don’t think you have a legitimate argument that comparing Hiroshima and Dresden is defining deviancy downward.
My point is that firebombing Dresden and nuking Hiroshima are equally immoral. And now we use Dresden as precedent and the minimum benchmark for just how ruthless we can be in war.
Well, I typed a lengthy response and then hit the wrong fucking button again and lost it all.
I’d venture to say that the number of countries that do not actively target civilians in conflict is considerably less than the number participating in the Olympics this year.
You’re correct that not targeting civilians is relatively recent. We did it 60 years ago. It sucks. We try to not do it anymore.
I’m inclined to think that not targeting the civilian population increases the likely hood that the state will go to war and thus is not progress.
I would like to see an official policy adopted that heads of state are considered priority targets in an armed conflict.
I know the leaders would be against it which is a clue that it might be an effective policy. There is a chain of command to cover your second concern.
I’ll throw out the historical timeline here. We live in a post-WWII world. Everybody here, me included, finds deliberately targeting civilian populations repugnant to greater or lesser degrees. We feel that way because War 2 opened everybody’s eyes to the end game of that logic. Prior to WWII, there were no real rules on treatment of enemy populations. If you’re bored, go read the Hague conventions. It’s not explicit anywhere in there that bombing the shit out of civilians is a bad thing. That didn’t come about until IV Geneva in 1949. The excesses of World War II are what led to an internatinal agreement to avoid deliberately targeting civilians. Trying to apply the standards that arose out of World War II to World War II is a flawed exercise.
There is no controversy. I remember a certain general named MacArthur who made a famous statement, “War is hell.” What part of this is misunderstood? Think that is bad? Think about everyone else who has been shot, maimed, or otherwise hurt due to war, and being the civilized humans we are, we have literally had thousands.
The Japanese started the war. It is a terrible thing that there are always going to be collateral damages. Tell me, what the “comfort women” the Japanese raped, sometimes up to 50 times a day? They easily numbered in the 200K range. I don’t see anyone having an outrage against them. How about the 100k or so POW’s that were savagely mistreated in Japanese concentration camps? How about the fact they killed, tortured, or maimed thousands of people in the Philippines. They deserved what they got.
I hope they have learned their lesson, do not try to take over the world.
“Tell me, what the “comfort women” the Japanese raped, sometimes up to 50 times a day? They easily numbered in the 200K range. I don’t see anyone having an outrage against them. How about the 100k or so POW’s that were savagely mistreated in Japanese concentration camps? How about the fact they killed, tortured, or maimed thousands of people in the Philippines. They deserved what they got.”
All the fault of Japanese women and children in Nagasaki and Hiroshima, no doubt. they truly deserved what they got.
While I agree with the concept of dropping the bomb, you’re looking a it wrong. Japan’s atrocities doesn’t justify us commiting atrocities. It just justifies criticism of Japan acting like the aggrieved, innocent victim when they continue to deny their own atrocities.
I just want to put this out in a Hiroshima thread:
“Terror” is a valid tactic to turn a state’s constituents against the state.
I think nuking Hiroshima/Nagasaki definitely qualifies as a “terror” tactic. It worked.
Terrorists use terrorism because … it works.
Is it right? Only in as far as it probably prevented the loss of far more capital and human lives; whatever ends a war fastest is probably the “right”-est in my opinion just due to minimizing the impact on wealth and production.
Actually the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had no such effect on the Japaneese people. Most of them were unaware of the bombs and those who were were largely still willing to sacrafice themselves for the glory of the emperor.
What it did do was to convince the emperor that he really was facing the possible extinction of the Japaneese people and way of life and convinced him to finally overrule his military advisors and agree to an unconditional surrender.
While I do agree that terrorism is a valid tactic to use in war I agrue against it’s effectiveness be because I am unaware of a single instance in history where it has successfully turned a people against it’s government and in nearly all cases I am aware of has produced exactly the opposite result.
Vietnam, Korea, American Revolution…
I guess I’m more equating guerrilla warfare to terrorism. Which I believe the two to be essentially the same.
First, Geurilla Warfare is not the same as terrorism, they are 2 completely seperate tactics that can be combined or not according to the dictates of the conflict.
Basically Geurilla warfare is using small unit hit and run tactics to harrass an enemy. These attacks can target eithe military or civilian targets and terror may or may not be a goal of any or all of them.
Terrorism is specific targeted attacks agains civilian populations with the goal of inspiring fear to bring about a desired political end. These may take the form of regular military unit actionsm, geurilla style raids on civilian targets, suicide bombings, , kidnapping, assasination, sabotage of support systems or any other method of killing or harming civilians in a manner to inspire fear.
Now as far as the effectiveness of terrorism, lets take those 3 in chronological order.
American Revolution – There was some terrorism on both sides carried out against civilians who sided with the other, however none of them were ever effective at changing the minds of eithet the American or Brittish populace (not that the opinion of the Brittish populace really mattered for anything in this fight) nor did they really do much to impact morale of the troops on either side. Also while the Amerioan side did use Geurilla tactics to good effect in a handful of battles it the war itself was decided by traditional standing armies fighting in exactly the same way they had for more than 50 years
… cont
Korea – Not really a ton of either terrorism or geurilla warfare going on here. Most battles were straight up fights between army groups supported by artillery and air power and what little there was had absolutely nothing to do with the outcome of the war nor did it change the minds of the populace of America, China, North Korea, or South Korea. None of those people turned away from their governments as a result of anything to do with that war.
Vietnam – Ok lots of terrorism and guerilla tactics on both sides here but lets look at their impact on morale of both the soldiers and the populace of the 3 countries involved.
By all accounts the army and people of North Vietnam maintained very high morale and loyalty to their government throughout the conflict so the terror and geurilla tactics had no impact on them.
On the other hand the people of South Vietnam never had any love for their government to begin with as it was an outgrowth of colonial power imposed on them by the French and was a joke of cronyism and corruption up through about 1970 after which it actually did start to develop some skill and maintained respectable levels of morale and acquiting itself commendably in the face of overwhelming odds leading up to the fall of Saigon. So again there was really no effect of terrorism or geurilla tactics driving a wedge between the people and the government.
Finally the US. Here we really did have a case of Morale and Loyalty starting very high and then deteriorating significantly as the war wore on. However did terrorism or geurilla tactics have anything to do with that? It’s not like American civilians were being targeted (0 deaths from 0 attacks)so there is no logical reason to conclude that terror attacks against random villiagers 10,000 miles away are what convinced the American people to turn their backs on the government. Especially not given that there is a FAR better explaination in obvious incompetence and corruption within the US government and military apparatus combined with color televisions bringing the horror of the war into American living rooms for the first time in history.
So we are still left with no cases recorded of terrorism successfully driving a wedge between a people and their government.
American morale in Vietnam rebounded significantly during the Abrams years. Winning will do that.
The NVA used terror tactics whenever the could. The Tet Offensive saw terror bombings in Saigon and mass executions in Hue City.
Ok there is one problem with all of this discussion of the morality of this or that weapon or this or that tactic.
All wars are inherently immoral. This does not mean that they are not occasionally necessary because reality is that nature doesn’t give a damn about our morality and occasionally forces us into situations where we have no choice but to perform an immoral act.
What this means is that the only moral course in a war is to end it by the quickest means possible. If that means nuclear weapons then so be it. If that means targeting civilians for mass casualties then so be it. Don’t for one second think any of this makes your actions any more moral because the ends do not justify the means but sometimes nature puts you into a position where being an inhuman monster is required and you need to do what is necessary to protect your family/friends/tribe/country/etc. and don’t let the necessity of the fact cloud your judgement of exactly how evil what you are doing is lest you start to think it is acceptable practice.
You just rephrased what I said directly above you.
So it would be more moral to kill millions of people to bring about a quick end to war, than to fight a low-intensity war that resulted in say, tens of thousands, dead?
No it would be neither as fighting in either war would be immoral.
Also I am unaware of any conflict in history which has presented those options.
If you possess the power to kill millions and your foe posseses sufficient power that killing millions would be required to bring about a rapid end to the war then the option of a low intensity conflict is really not likely to be available to you.
The closest you could come would be if you considered the ENTIRE cold war to be one long drawn out low intensity conflict between the US and the USSR, in which case your death toll is significantly higher than tens of thousands and is in fact in the 10’s of millions.
This just in: War is hell.
Bonus: Hawks and doves disagree.
No violence is moral. Some violence is necessary (we must destroy and be violent to eat, survive, etc). Some violence is justified, i.e, self defense. I think the atomic bombings were not only to zap the Japanese will to fight, but also to show the world what we had. The Soviets were most certainly paying attention. We had decided as a nation to go to war, and the actions of our nation were no more moral than those of any other nation at war. It was not moral, it was simply war. I forget the civil war general who said something to effect of, ‘War is cruelty, and the more cruel it is, the sooner it is over.’ Is it worth taking up our time trying to hash through the morality of war sixty years ago? Can it translate into softer warfare in the future? I don’t know. I do know, or believe, rather, war will always accompany humans for as long into the future as I can imagine.
No violence is moral.
Bullshit. Self defense is moral, not justifiable. You have no moral obligation to let someone harm you.
‘not moral’ does not mean ‘wrong’. In my view it is justifiable, but no violence, again in my view, is moral. Resisting self harm is understandable and justifiable, but morality I would argue does not come into play. Harming someone, even in the act of self preservation can never be moral, though it is also not wrong. Is it moral to kill an organism to eat? Do you think of morality when you eat a steak? Or pick a plant from your garden, effectively killing it? It isn’t moral nor is it wrong.
Every freely chosen act has a moral dimension. Saying something is neither moral nor immoral is a cop out or a sign of incompletely considered ethics. Implicitly, by saying violence can never be moral you’re consigning it to being some variety of immoral, which, again, is bullshit. Self defense is perfectly moral even if you use violence to do it.
^this
(mostly). i am not sure every freely chosen act has a moral dimension. if i decide to make cereal or eggs in the morning, i see no moral dimension, but maybe i am missing the morality somewhere?
after all, as pj says- if meat is murder are eggs rape?
I’ll posit the moral dimension may be inconsequential, but it’s still there. Of course, if I were a whackjob I’d posit that you have to consider the farming practices and carbon footprint of either food choice in order to make the decision.
And eggs aren’t rape. You’re just eating a chicken menses. Yum.
i grok your point. not sure if i agree with it. i am thinking there has to be SOME choice somewhere that has NO moral dimension whatsoever. like the color of underwear you choose to wear, or which pair of socks etc.
the problem with statements like “every …” is all you need is one counterexample to render it false.
It’s “not moral” for you to save your five-year-old daughter by knocking upside the head of the low-life who is trying to rape her? Funny, but I’d have thought that one of the most moral actions one could take.
It’s obvious why they don’t release color photos of dead and wounded victims and casualties on either side, but how about an accurate casualty count? All we ever hear from Iraq and Afghanistan is the total number of US dead, not how many are wounded and how badly, or any numbers for the other side.
FDR allowed the release of “With the Marines on Tarawa” to inform the public of the long and horribly bloody road still ahead of us when it was released in 1944. It has start to finish unedited footage of Bloody Tarawa. A thousand Marines were killed in 3 days.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W….._at_Tarawa
The footage was shocking to the public and showed a beach covered in dead Marines, burned and dead Japanese bodies, and badly wounded Americans – all in color. The level of hate and violence in WWII is hard to comprehend these days.
Old WWII anti-japanese propaganda is racist as hell. The D-Day Museum in New Orleans has a nice selection on display.
I guess you could call “With the Marines on Tarawa” propaganda, but is certainly wasn’t the normal feel-good stuff.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…..ure=relmfu
It was shown in theaters across the country. The images at the 5:00 mark were beyond shocking to the public.
fuck you dolphin and whale!!!
“The level of hate and violence in WWII is hard to comprehend these days.”
Interesting debate yall are having. I would remind yall that it was fucking war. There are no rules. You pull out all the stops. Morality doesnt mean a goddamned thing. You either win or you and your children die. It is just that simple.
Sitting in your cushy office chair almost 75 years later banging away on your computer in an air conditioned office debating the morality of what those people did is kind of ridiculous.
With that said, I will add that war is the most horrible thing that can happen. It should be avoided at all costs short of death or slavery.
Ah, the Captains of Hinsight vomit forth their ‘wisdom’ once more.
Here is wisdom– There is NO morality to war. It is the ultimate immorality. It is what happens when all else fails. In war, there is only survival. After survival is assured, then morality can be resumed, then can the wounds be treated.
“We sleep soundly in our beds because rough men stand ready in the night to visit violence on those who would do us harm.” ? Winston Churchill
I would call it the right thing to do. Isn’t this a calculus of the opportunity cost in death between the choices?
As I see it, you have to win, you look at your different means to win, and try to minimize number and painfulness of the deaths on both sides (preferences to your own side, realistically).
If you go by that, don’t you drop them? I am not sure that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the right demonstrations, but I am sure that hiding the horror of it all is definitely wrong.
If some of us are going to weigh in and say it was right, we have to do so while looking all the horror directly.
I’m a bit more outraged at the not nice things Japan did to their neighbors than the notion that the US government apparently hid photos of bombing victims. Of course this apparent act of censorship will provide some ammunition for the crowd that considers Japan as a “victim” of a atomic bomb.
The bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima isn’t universally popular among Koreans and Chinese (some of who have died in the bombing). But I doubt they’ll harbor resentment over the US government stashing away photos of burn victims who may have benefited the forced labor produced by Japanese occupation. The victims of that tragedy has no one but themselves and their government to blame.
This personally strikes me as hollow / selective outrage, not unlike when leftists charge Americans for using racist stereotypes of Japanese in WW2 propaganda, point to the hypocrisy in segregated units fighting for “freedom”, or obsess over Manzanar as another example of dislocation of minorities under the US government. When reminded of the scale of Japanese war crimes and racial purification that dwarf all of that, they’ll answer with some glib “well just because they’re bad doesn’t mean we have to be bad too”.
It doesn’t boggle my mind. That’s expected of people whose nation existed mostly in prosperity, was never invaded by a fascist nation in modern times, and who will often define struggles of other people through their Jim Crow era civil rights struggle.
Jeeze, I’m trying to remember the last time the US was involved in an “unambiguously just” war? or even an “unambiguously just” cause – I’m talking about the actual cause and not the supposed one.
Thank you for your well-thought content.
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