Was the atomic bombing of Japan ethical

Our modern nukes make Fat Man and Littleboy look like toys. Modern nukes are far more destructive.

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As I understand it, the average, baseline tactical nuke is somewhere in the ballpark of Nagasaki.

Read: the shit we would have used to vaporize a division of Soviet tanks in Germany and kill a bunch of other divisions with radiation poisoning.

There's a lovely picture floating around somewhere with some landmark nuclear blasts on a scaled graph, and Nagasaki and Hiroshima are barely visible on the thing. To put it into perspective, around a decade after '45 the US dropped the largest warhead it's ever live-tested, which rated at ~15mt. The Hiroshima blast was ~13-15kt.

So, the largest nuke we've ever live-tested was an order of magnitude what we dropped in Japan, and today we have city-buster long-range missiles that are still more powerful than that, albeit not tested at such a yield due to test bans and such.

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Don't forget Tsar Bomba, biggest nuclear weapon ever fired. Compared to that monster, bombs that hit Nagasaki and Hiroshima were firecrackers.

Oh Lordy Lordy, how did I make that typo? Gah. Yes, I meant to say they shouldn't have. I apologize for not clarifying earlier. I intended to state a departure from the military doctrine of attacking civilian targets. Total war is wrong. You avoid the civilian populations at all costs. Causing widespread civilian death was probably a major reason segments of the Japanese public had adopted a willing-to-die-to-the-last-woman-and-child attitude at that point in the war. My bad for not stating this earlier.

I will admit that I may be assuming more targeting ability than the technology of the time allowed. I don't know how precise we could be in targeting things like factories and shipyards. But at the very least, no heavy-saturation carpet-firebombing of civilian areas.

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You severely overestimate their targeting capabilities.

In Operation Crossroads, the first post-war American nuclear test, the crew of the bomber dropping the "Able" bomb in the first round of testing missed their target by a few hundred yards. You know, that doesn't sound so bad, given that this is a nuclear weapon we're talking about.

They not only failed to destroy the ship they were aiming for, but barely managed to even damage most of the ships.

Besides that, total war may be wrong, but it's the only way you win anymore. Look at the US Civil War. It was a four-year waste of time followed by a lightning round of total war that ended the whole fiasco in a matter of months. Likewise, WWI was a gigantic waste of time protracted by a lack of ability to get at the manufacturing centers.

The civilians should never be your target; the factories and supply centers are. Hell, we told the Japanese to evacuate their cities. They refused.

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Oh, I'm not arguing that total war is anything other than an ugly business; however, it's a process that had already been started by every belligerent power. Had the Japanese decided to cease the strategy of mobilizing their entire civilian population for use as a resource in war, then attacking civilians would have been nothing short of murder. As it was, though, it was dirty fighting in a dirty war; the civilians were a vital strategic resource, and in order to significantly weaken the Japanese war machine, targeting them was cold, hard pragmatism.

@USAF I believe you wanted this chart. It used to be on Hiroshima as a Unit of Measure but was removed for some reason.

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At the very least, we don't have to go after residential areas.

Firebombing was used against residential areas.

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Considering that especially in the latter part of the war, Japan's industrial capability was based mostly on smaller shops spread around the place (big industrial centers being, at that point, overglorified "please bomb me into rubble" signs ), there's no way a conventional bombing campaign to force capitulation could have avoided mass civilian casualties that dwarfed the atomic bombings.

WW 2 bombers were not precision bombing platforms by any stretch of the imagination, Norden and radar bomb sights (the latter of which were prone to breakdowns that required using visual targeting anyway) or not.

edited 8th Dec '11 5:14:40 AM by Nohbody

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What capitulation? We didn't scare the hardliners out of a coup, we didn't break up their economic/industrial complex, we didn't try the Emperor. Just bomb large targets. With Manchukuo gone, their resource base was extremely limited.

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I don't have a source for this, but I remember hearing before that, while the rest of Japan was getting bombarded with firebombs, Hiroshima and Nagasaki were left relatively unmolested specifically so that, when the nuclear bombs were ready to go, they'd have fairly pristine targets to demonstrate their power on (turning one pile of ashen rubble into an even ashier pile of rubble wouldn't have made nearly as big an impact). If that's true, then what would the death tolls in Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been like if they hadn't been spared the worst of the conventional air raids?

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^^ "Limited" is not the same thing as "nonexistent".

But sure, let's posit the atomic bombs weren't dropped, for whatever reason. How many more months of deaths from disease and starvation are an acceptable cost for not using them? The hardships the civilians were facing because of the decisions of the ruling military class weren't exactly at the forefront of the minds of said ruling class, except perhaps as anti-Allies propaganda material.

^ Yes, the relative lack of previous bombardment was considered an issue by the targeting committee, for the purposes of evaluating the effects of the bombs. Nagasaki wasn't even a primary target for "Fat Man", in part because it had been bombed, if not as frequently as elsewhere. FM was originally intended for Kokura (major arsenal facilities), but bad weather prevented visual targeting and the bombardier of "Bocks Car" was under orders to not bomb via radar bomb sight unless neither primary nor secondary could be visually targeted.

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I doubt that our planners wanted to end the war for the sole sake of helping the Japanese citizenry. We just wanted it done.

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Dropping it was unethical. Not dropping it would also be unethical. Either way, lots of people would die.

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Hah, ethical...war is never ethical...so no, dropping it is not ethical...on the other hand, consider the projected casualties of Downfall, the unwillingness to surrender of of some Japanese governmental factions, and that firebombings are killing more people, and that continued bombing will kill even more...nuke is the best choice possible...

History happens, and we debate...but if we're to see their perspectives, we need to consider the limitations of technology and knowledge of events that happened back then...we have much clearer perspective of events that transpired than the people who need to make decisions, and we basically took for granted that some technology that we used today existed back then...my old IB History class have a debate about the nuke dropping once (situation assumed that Truman got judged in late 40s/early 50s), I and 2 other people are on judge panel, and then we started about the use of bombing to cut down military targets after the debate was done...I'm the only one who can wrap around the concept that precision bombing don't work back then, and only large fleet of bombers can destroy the targets properly, which means collateral damage anyway...

Is target civilians with nukes bad? Yes, but our only other method also targets them anyway...so it's better to do something to end the war as soon as possible than to drag it on...

edited 9th Dec '11 3:36:12 AM by onyhow

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Atomic bombing Hirsohima and Nagasai is Like Russia Dropping anthrax in the capital of Chechenya. I actually got that comparison by looking at The Sum Of All Fears which is a pretty good movie despite being based on a book by Tom Clancy.

How on earth could that be ethical??? Just because the Allies won that doesnt mean they where all that much better than the Nazis. While they stablished a better goverment overall since they have some good goals, their methods many times where exactly the same as that of their enemies.

Lets remember that some Nazi prisoners where sold as slaves after WWII to work in England and Australia as forced labour, for example. But you wont find that on a history book.

edited 18th Dec '11 8:19:45 AM by Baff

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...Oh no, we are not going down this route. It was a multiple-shades-of-grey and pitch black conflict.

Why da zog're you even bringing this up, anyway?

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Oh sure, let's go with the other rouse that didn't involve nuking: sending troops to die and fight on Japanese main island, where every man, woman and child is armed. Place where you can't trust anyone not to try and kill you.

There is a reason why they went with nukes. They hoped that attacks would be so devastating that Japan would surrender in fear of more of suchs attacks, resulting smaller casulty numbers. It worked.

Finaly, power of nukes weren't really understood. That was the first time they were used as a weapons. After that, nobody has ever wished to forced to use them again.

What about not invading Japan?

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The nuclear weapons taboo took a while to fully mature. General Mac Arthur, for instance, needed a good caning before it solidified. But yes, the devastation would be a key part of the taboo.

Not invading the actively hostile military power tussling over all the outlying territories, you mean? Good lord, I thought Europeans got a good grounding in history.

edited 18th Dec '11 9:23:30 AM by DomaDoma

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I believe the idea's supposed to be that Japan's military was so devastated by that point that an invasion was not necessary to destroy their ability to attack their neighbors.

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Where there's a will and a lack of standards, inability counts for surprisingly little. See: Al Qaida in Iraq.

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I'm not so certain of my personal opinion on this matter, so I'm going to post someone else's instead. My godmother was a survivor of the Nagasaki bombing, and she considered it a necessity, if an unpleasant one.

I'm not entirely convinced myself, as I said above, but I felt like that was a perspective worth posting either way.

edited 18th Dec '11 9:37:58 AM by INUH

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You know, most of the more rational and less emotionally involved people have already established that neither choice was particularly ethical, but with what they knew at the time, it made more sense and was more logical to use the nukes than Operation Downfall. That, and they told Japan to evacuate the cities. The blood of their citizens is ultimately on their own hands.

Is it horrible? Yes. Is it any worse than the other events of World War II? Not particularly. You just complain because it's a nuke, even if other bombings did more damage (Dresden, Tokyo, Hamburg, etc.).

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Yup. There's always a trade-off somewhere, and that's never more true than in war. I think that's a good bottom line.

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