I could swear that I read somewhere that we assured them that the emperor would be allowed to retain power, but nothing I can find now hints at that.
Were Hirosmima and Nagasaki Ethical actions?
- Thread starter jmpet
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I could swear that I read somewhere that we assured them that the emperor would be allowed to retain power, but nothing I can find now hints at that.
The Japanese still have an Emperor. We let him stay in as a figurehead to allow them to keep some of their heritage. After all it was the military that was running the country during the later parts of the war. The emperor probably would have surrendered before they did if not for his fear of the military.
KRR
Yes, but I can find nothing that corroborates my apparently mistaken notion that we had given them any official assurance that this would be allowed prior to their surrender. On the record, we stated that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan
I agree with this completely. How lucky we are that the first use of nuclear weapons was at a time when we only had two available and only one side had them at all. Consider the fact that in our first use of nuclear weapons we used every one that we had.
Now what if we hadn't used them in WW2 and the first use had been the Cuban Missile Crisis? Instead of shooting off two nukes, we might well have shot our entire wad of 31,000 nuclear weapons with most of them far more powerful than those used in Japan.
I don't want to start a new thread since we are talking about the justification for atomic (and I suppose nuclear) weapons as a justified course of action for some Realpolitik reason.
So let me ask: is there any justifiable use for atomic or nuclear weapons today? Or would it require such a change in direction that we're talking about another reality?
For example, the long ramp that led up to the invasion of Iraq... it takes a lot of saber rattling and bravado to go ahead and invade another nation... we couldn't have invaded them a week after 9/11 (which had nothing to do with Iraq BTW)... we needed to sell the sizzle to the world before we "justiably" invaded Iraq.
I mean, we can take Iranian or North Korean rhetoric and blow it up massively into an international affair at which point war would become neccesary and with it, nuclear weapons. Can we nuke someone today and get away with it?
So let me ask: is there any justifiable use for atomic or nuclear weapons today? Or would it require such a change in direction that we're talking about another reality?
For example, the long ramp that led up to the invasion of Iraq... it takes a lot of saber rattling and bravado to go ahead and invade another nation... we couldn't have invaded them a week after 9/11 (which had nothing to do with Iraq BTW)... we needed to sell the sizzle to the world before we "justiably" invaded Iraq.
I mean, we can take Iranian or North Korean rhetoric and blow it up massively into an international affair at which point war would become neccesary and with it, nuclear weapons. Can we nuke someone today and get away with it?
superstring01
Moderator
If you're creative enough, you can come up with a myriad of good reasons to use nukes: the release of an ecophage, an outbreak of a potential pandemic that has to be contained, an alien invasion, the release of an uncontrollable hostile AI, as a last resort to prevent a nation from destroying other nations with the same weapons. Barring those conditions, I really can't imagine any real "ethical" reasons.
~String
~String
Not practically, I don't think.
The nukes we have are bigger, the radioactive particles would spread too far, inevitably there would either be an ally or someone we didn't want to antagonize downwind or downstream who'd be really p.o'ed at radioactive fallout or radiation rendering their water source(s) unusable.
I think we'd honstly have to get launched on first by, say North Korea (the Iranians are not insane enough) before we could get away with nuking politically.
Speaking ethically, not practically, I'm not sure there's any good reason to use them currently.
I say this thinking that full-out nuclear war would kill all of us, kill most of the vertebrate species on the earth if not all, and potentially even take things back to bacteria. It would be pushing the reset button on planetary evolution.
That's very immoral to even risk the remote possibility of. My own ideals include survival of my species, survival of other species, protection of the biosphere, and our eventual movement into space...so a nuclear war for the short-term goals of a country, when compared to a species imperative like get off the rock, figure out how to colonize the solar system...well, the long-term survival of the species ought to come first.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki I'm prepared to accept as a somewhat special case. This is why: We had two bombs, and only two. They were a lot smaller than the current thermonulear weapons. We had very little idea how dangerous radiation/ radioactive fine particulates were back then. We thought we'd kill more of us and them in a conventional invasion.
I'll give it a "very vaguely moral." At the moment. Unless someone comes up with a really good argument otherwise.
How would you feel about an arsenal of F-22's carrying low yield nuclear "clean" bombs then? Something we enough to be on the Hiroshima scale, no bigtime nukes. Something that we can sweep a nation and carpet bomb it with small nukes to the point of annihalation- not mega-bombs with all kinds of fallout and stuff? 100 kilotons or less- small-time nukes. Each bomb would only be 5 times as bad as Hiroshima- it's take out say, 5 miles- not 500. Is that more acceptable as an arsenal?
Have we gone too far and too big?? the WW II bombs were 20 kilotons, icmbs today are megatons. Is it overkill?
Are you favor of a healthy military that uses small tactical nukes as precision instruments?
Have we gone too far and too big?? the WW II bombs were 20 kilotons, icmbs today are megatons. Is it overkill?
Are you favor of a healthy military that uses small tactical nukes as precision instruments?
I don't.
It was also a lost opportunity to abjure the use of the things altogether, and avoid building them in quantity by then-enforceable agreement.
After all, it wasn't the examples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki that scared everyone, but the test data among the knowledgeable and the propaganda afterwards among the citizenry - the pictures of the blast radius superimposed over maps of cities, the pictures of the test explosions and the remains of the islands used, etc.
I think scaring the shit out of Stalin, by demonstrating our willingness to use nukes on cities, was a major factor in the insanity of the Cold War and the huge overkill buildup of the things.
Stalin was privy to our development of the weapons, and well aware of our actual situation regarding Japan (the Japanese, after being rebuffed by the US, had made overtures of surrender through the Russians). He was looking down the barrel of the huge US military buildup on his borders, ostensibly readying for an invasion of Japan but in reality destined for no such thing - and he knew that. He had just been invaded, abortively, by US forces - what looked like a trial run. He was a paranoid megalomaniac anyway, one well aware of his own weakness and vulnerability.
Stalin ruined the Russian economy in a desperate attempt to establish a counterthreat. He never did catch up, but not for lack of effort. That effort would hardly have been made without the threat in the first place.
That Truman was just trying to bluff him down and simultaneously set him up as a boogeyman, from personal abhorrence on one hand and to justify the continued expansion of the "military/industrial complex" on the other, was only one of the possibilities he faced.
Excellent point; agreed. Although frankly both sides would probably have cheated anyway. But there certainly would have been fewer of them.