Was the atomic bombing of Japan ethical

You know it's true...

In Chess the King is less of a threat than several of the other pieces, but you still need to go after it to win the game. I mean, in the recent Libyan Revolution, loads and loads of effort was put into capturing or killing Muammar Gaddafi, a guy who was almost 70 years old; I doubt he was considered much of a threat in a fight. Yet can you deny that attacking him was vital to the Revolution establishing firm control over the country?

Yes, obviously the A -Bombs were targeted at the Japanese leadership.

The only valid point in defense of the bombing is that they were told to evacuate.

edited 19th Dec '11 11:32:00 AM by Qeise

Laws are made to be broken. You're next, thermodynamics.

Well, considering we'd already flattened Tokyo...

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The point is that neither babies nor Heads of State pose much in the way of a physical threat, but because of how others react to attacks against them they can be useful in terms of defeating an organization. Now, Heads of State, unlike babies, choose to take part in war and accept the attendant risks, but as we've already established, if you're fighting a country with mandatory military service, you're gonna be killing innocent people who didn't want to fight anyway.

As far as I'm concerned you want the policy that results in the fewest deaths (not an absolute, but pretty important). Soldiers end up as soldiers for all sorts of reasons, everyone had a draft, and don't tell me that a japanese fisherman's son who joins the army for the glory of japan because he venerates Japanese history the way many Americans venerate Thomas Jefferson is an evil son of a bitch. The expected casualty rates for the invasion of Japan weren't done by people who knew about nukes, they didn't know there were any other options. The offer of surrender was made by people who didn't have authority to surrender.

The nuclear bombing of Japan was moral because the person who made that decision, Harry S Truman, carefully considered the options and chose the one with the smallest loss of life (which was still tragically large). We told them it was coming. We gave them info about the bomb. We told them where we were going to drop it three days in advance so evacuations could happen. And when the radiation was found, an effort was made to clean it up. Just because an option sucks and is horrible doesn't mean it's unethical. Unethical is failing to even try to do the right thing, or when you find the right thing, doing something else. We don't live in a magical world where you can only hurt bad people and keep them from hurting good people if you just try hard enough. We're getting better at it though.

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Correction: He chose the option gave Japan to us quicker because he was afraid the Soviets would go for it.

Carry on.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

A Soviet invasion of Japan (or really, any invasion) would kill far more people than the nukes would, so that's still a worse option for the Japanese.

Assuming that the Soviets would have been successful in launching an invasion before the Japanese surrendered to the Americans. If they had blockaded the islands, that is as effective as keeping anyone from coming in as it is for keeping anyone from getting out.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

So you'd rather we starve the whole island?

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The blockade strategy necessitated bombing Japan anyways. Conventional bombing of cities over that long a period of time would have killed far more people than the atomic bombs did, and of course, that's not even including the fact that many more people would be left to slowly starve to death. In short, the prolonged suffering that this strategy would entail coupled with the cost of extending the war for even longer do not make it a more ethical (if ethics would even come into play here) decision than dropping the nukes, which affected far fewer people over a much shorter period of time.

That's assuming that the were not starving and suffering after the atomic bombing anyways. The surrender did not turn things around overnight.

I'm repeating myself. I've outlined my arguments in this thread before, and will let them stand.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

No, but a blockade would have made the situation a lot worse; otherwise, if it would make no difference, why go through with it at all?

Ummm, people seem to like blockades for some reason. I guess the idea is your not shooting people, burning them, or exploding them. Instead you cut off the food supply, medicine, and other supplies. The time since WWII has been an era of sanctions and blockades. Look at what happens to places blockaded: Gaza, Iraq, N. Korea, Cuba. The harm that is done is falls overwhelmingly on the civilians, you don't actually end the conflict, and lots of people die anyway. There have been successful blockades, Berlin and Cuba. However with Berlin the blockade failed to an airlift and the cuban blockade turned into sanctions. Also in both of those cases the blockading power was making demands from a different entity than it was blockading.

Can anyone name a blockade/sanctions situation that led to victory for the blockader over the blockaded in the last 100 years?

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I have yet to see a blockade used on a country that was actually offering surrender, like Japan of the time.

Of course, that was not the only option either. We could have falsely accepted conditional surrender terms, moved the military in under terms of "development", and then kidnapped the war criminals under extrajudicial operations.

Share it so that people can get into this conversation, 'cause we're not the only ones who think like this.

But, those terms were not half as favorable to the US. Why should they go the illegal, expensive and time consuming route just to let Japan save face after everything they'd done? It doesn't make sense; nobody would do that, especially when they'd already agreed to accept nothing less than unconditional surrender (which they'd already given Germany, presumably without further destroying the country afterwards.). If the Japanese military really cared about its civilians, it would have accepted the Potsdam declaration hinting that "prompt and utter destruction was imminent" if they didn't comply, instead of refusing in order to "save face", part of their twisted arrogance, no doubt.

edited 19th Dec '11 4:52:21 PM by tropetown

I read this and revised my opinion a bit. The "surrender" mentioned here seems to be one where the government of Japan only give up part of their conquests, which was their original plan in the first place. It would have been seen as more of a truce. It also seemed that the oft mentioned surrender was to be several months before either the Atom bomb was finished and before the Soviets declared their intentions to fight Japan. There were attempts to open negotiations through the Soviets, which the Soviets stopped. There were a lot of claims about wanting to be sure the Emperor was protected that kept the war going, despite the Emperor's desire to surrender. I'm not convinced that the government of Japan was willing to stop being an imperial power until after Nagasaki. A navel blockade looks like it would have strung out the war, sapped will to finish to the people in the US, and allowed Imperial Japan to continue existing. If we invaded with the Soviets there would have been a North Japan and a South Japan, does anyone think that wouldn't have led to some incredible amount of human suffering, even if another war didn't break out?

Sex, Drugs, and Rationality

I've been trying to say that, but I couldn't find the right words. It's the same reason they couldn't risk a strategy that would somehow result in a shadow of Nazi Germany remaining; having a strong Neo-State Shinto spirit somehow lingering in the country (which, given the fact that one of the Japanese terms was to allow themselves to keep calling their emperor a god, was almost guaranteed to happen. Can't really claim full defeat if your god is still with you, guiding you into a new century [or whatever propaganda they'd spread about the why the God Emperor would one day lead Japan into recapturing their glory]) might have resulted in some people trying to rebuild the threat of fascism in their country at a later date. So, of course, the defeat of Japan had to be a complete victory in order to break them as a future threat; it might even be that the Americans and Soviets didn't want to begin the Cold War, or expect it to become what it did, but they had obviously planned for the eventuality that the countries wouldn't be entirely within the grasp of the two superpower blocs.

edited 19th Dec '11 6:01:05 PM by tropetown

There were some generals who insisted that they should fight till the bitter end. Emperor grew balls and told them fuck off and surrendered.

I find it amusing that we where told that the Japanese would fight till the last woman and child.

And that we would be greated as liberators in Iraq and Afghanistan.

edited 19th Dec '11 8:16:24 PM by Baff

I will always cherish the chance of a new beggining.

You know what else is amusing? Abbott and Costello routines.

But those routines are off-topic, as is your comment.

Anyways, on topic, yeah, there really was no ethical choice of action.

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Yeah, as has been stated repeatedly, bombing was, in their minds, the way to end the fewest lives.

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And I direct you to my first post: terrorism is ok when it's done by the victors. I'm not saying there was a better course of action available, just that it's hypocritical and unethical.

Laws are made to be broken. You're next, thermodynamics.

That doesn't make sense to me. If all other options are more unethical than a certain course of action, then that action is ethical by default.