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offers reasons for and against dropping the bomb

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The Fat Man mushroom cloud resulting from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rises into the air from the hypocenter.

Substantial debate exists over the ethical, legal, and military aspects of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 August and 9 August 1945 at the close of World War II (1939-45).

On 26 July 1945 at the Potsdam Conference, United States President Harry S. Truman, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and President of China Chiang Kai-shek issued the Potsdam Declaration which outlined the terms of surrender for the Empire of Japan. This ultimatum stated if Japan did not surrender, it would face "prompt and utter destruction". Some debaters focus on the presidential decision-making process, and others on whether or not the bombings were the proximate cause of Japanese surrender.

Over the course of time, different arguments have gained and lost support as new evidence has become available and as new studies have been completed. A primary focus has been on whether the bombing should be categorized as a war crime and/or as a crime against humanity. There is also the debate on the role of the bombings in Japan's surrender and the U.S.'s justification for them based upon the premise that the bombings precipitated the surrender. This remains the subject of both scholarly and popular debate, with revisionist historians advancing a variety of arguments. In 2005, in an overview of historiography about the matter, J. Samuel Walker wrote, "the controversy over the use of the bomb seems certain to continue". Walker stated, "The fundamental issue that has divided scholars over a period of nearly four decades is whether the use of the bomb was necessary to achieve victory in the war in the Pacific on terms satisfactory to the United States."

Supporters of the bombings generally assert that they caused the Japanese surrender, preventing massive casualties on both sides in the planned invasion of Japan: Kyūshū was to be invaded in November 1945 and Honshū four months later. It was thought Japan would not surrender unless there was an overwhelming demonstration of destructive capability. Those who oppose the bombings argue it was militarily unnecessary, inherently immoral, a war crime, or a form of state terrorism. Critics believe a naval blockade and conventional bombings would have forced Japan to surrender unconditionally. Some critics believe Japan was more motivated to surrender by the Soviet Union's invasion of Manchuria and other Japanese-held areas.

There are voices which assert that the bomb should never have been used at all. I cannot associate myself with such ideas. ... I am surprised that very worthy people-but people who in most cases had no intention of proceeding to the Japanese front themselves-should adopt the position that rather than throw this bomb, we should have sacrificed a million American and a quarter of a million British lives.

A map outlining the Japanese and U.S. (but not other Allied) ground forces scheduled to take part in the ground battle for Japan. Two landings were planned:
(1) Olympic - the invasion of the southern island, Kyūshū,
(2) Coronet - the invasion of the main island, Honshū.

March 1946's Operation Coronet was planned to take Tokyo with a landing of 25 divisions, compared to D-Day's 12 divisions.

Those who argue in favor of the decision to drop the atomic bombs on enemy targets believe massive casualties on both sides would have occurred in Operation Downfall, the planned Allied invasion of Japan. The bulk of the force invading Japan would be American although the British Commonwealth would contribute three divisions of troops (one each from the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia).

The U.S. anticipated losing many combatants in Downfall, although the number of expected fatalities and wounded is subject to some debate. U.S. President Harry S. Truman stated in 1953 he had been advised U.S. casualties could range from 250,000 to one million combatants. Assistant Secretary of the Navy Ralph Bard, a member of the Interim Committee on atomic matters, stated that while meeting with Truman in the summer of 1945 they discussed the bomb's use in the context of massive combatant and non-combatant casualties from invasion, with Bard raising the possibility of a million Allied combatants being killed. As Bard opposed using the bomb without warning Japan first, he cannot be accused of exaggerating casualty expectations to justify the bomb's use, and his account is evidence that Truman was aware of, and government officials discussed, the possibility of one million casualties. However, other estimates were lower. For example, on June 18, 1945, General Douglas MacArthur, the commander of the invasion force, predicted 95,000 casualties (a third of those deaths) in the first 90 days of the invasion.

A quarter of a million casualties is roughly the level the Joint War Plans Committee estimated, in its paper (JWPC 369/1) prepared for Truman's 18 June meeting. A review of documents from the Truman Library shows Truman's initial draft response to the query describes General Marshall only as saying "one quarter of a million would be the minimum". The "as much as a million" phrase was added to the final draft by Truman's staff, so as not to appear to contradict an earlier statement given in a published article by Stimson (former Secretary of War). In a study done by the Joint Chiefs of Staff in April 1945, the figures of 7.45 casualties per 1,000 man-days and 1.78 fatalities per 1,000 man-days were developed. This implied the two planned campaigns to conquer Japan would cost 1.6 million U.S. casualties, including 380,000 dead. JWPC 369/1 (prepared June 15, 1945) which provided planning information to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, estimated an invasion of Japan would result in 40,000 U.S. dead and 150,000 wounded. Delivered on June 15, 1945, after insight gained from the Battle of Okinawa, the study noted Japan's inadequate defenses resulting from a very effective sea blockade and the Allied firebombing campaign. Generals George C. Marshall and Douglas MacArthur signed documents agreeing with the Joint War Plans Committee estimate.

In addition, a large number of Japanese combatant and non-combatant casualties were expected as a result of such actions. Contemporary estimates of Japanese deaths from an invasion of the Home Islands range from several hundreds of thousands to as high as ten million. General MacArthur's staff provided an estimated range of American deaths depending on the duration of the invasion, and also estimated a 22:1 ratio of Japanese to American deaths. From this, a low figure of somewhat more than 200,000 Japanese deaths can be calculated for a short invasion of two weeks, and almost three million Japanese deaths if the fighting lasted four months. A widely cited estimate of five to ten million Japanese deaths came from a study by William Shockley and Quincy Wright; the upper figure was used by Assistant Secretary of War John J. McCloy, who characterized it as conservative. Some 400,000 additional Japanese deaths might have occurred in the expected Soviet invasion of Hokkaido, the northernmost of Japan's main islands, An Air Force Association webpage states that "Millions of women, old men, and boys and girls had been trained to resist by such means as attacking with bamboo spears and strapping explosives to their bodies and throwing themselves under advancing tanks." The AFA noted that "[t]he Japanese cabinet had approved a measure extending the draft to include men from ages fifteen to sixty and women from seventeen to forty-five (an additional 28 million people)".

The great loss of life during the battle of Iwo Jima and other Pacific islands gave U.S. leaders an idea of the casualties that would happen with a mainland invasion. Of the 22,060 Japanese combatants entrenched on Iwo Jima, 21,844 died either from fighting or by ritual suicide. Only 216 Japanese POWs were held at the hand of the Americans during the battle. According to the official Navy Department Library website, "The 36-day (Iwo Jima) assault resulted in more than 26,000 American casualties, including 6,800 dead" with 19,217 wounded. To put this into context, the 82-day Battle of Okinawa lasted from early April until mid-June 1945 and U.S. casualties (out of five Army and two Marine divisions) were above 62,000, of which more than 12,000 were killed or missing.

The U.S. military had nearly 500,000 Purple Heart medals manufactured in anticipation of potential casualties from the planned invasion of Japan. To date, all American military casualties of the 60 years following the end of World War II, including the Korean and Vietnam Wars, have not exceeded that number. In 2003, there were still 120,000 of these Purple Heart medals in stock. Because of the number available, combat units in Iraq and Afghanistan were able to keep Purple Hearts on hand for immediate award to wounded soldiers on the field.

Supporters of the bombings argue waiting for the Japanese to surrender would also have cost lives. "For China alone, depending upon what number one chooses for overall Chinese casualties, in each of the ninety-seven months between July 1937 and August 1945, somewhere between 100,000 and 200,000 persons perished, the vast majority of them noncombatants. For the other Asian states alone, the average probably ranged in the tens of thousands per month, but the actual numbers were almost certainly greater in 1945, notably due to the mass death in a famine in Vietnam."

The end of the war limited the expansion of the Japanese controlled Vietnamese famine of 1945, stopping it at 1-2 million deaths and also liberated millions of Allied prisoners of war and civilian laborers working in harsh conditions under a forced mobilization. In the Dutch East Indies, there was a "forced mobilization of some 4 million-although some estimates are as high as 10 million- romusha (manual labourers) ... About 270,000 romusha were sent to the Outer Islands and Japanese-held territories in Southeast Asia, where they joined other Asians in performing wartime construction projects. At the end of the war, only 52,000 were repatriated to Java."

Supporters also point to an order given by the Japanese War Ministry on August 1, 1944, ordering the execution of Allied POWs, "when an uprising of large numbers cannot be suppressed without the use of firearms" or when the POW camp was in the combat zone, in fear that "escapees from the camp may turn into a hostile fighting force". The only existing original copy of this general order was found by Jack Edwards after the war, in the ruins of the Kinkaseki prisoner of war camp in Formosa.

The Operation Meetinghouse firebombing raid on Tokyo alone killed 100,000 civilians on the night of March 9-10, 1945, causing more civilian death and destruction than either of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A total of 350,000 civilians died in the incendiary raids on 67 Japanese cities. Because the United States Army Air Forces wanted to use its fission bombs on previously undamaged cities in order to have accurate data on nuclear-caused damage, Kokura, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Niigata were preserved from conventional bombing raids. Otherwise, they would all have been firebombed. Intensive conventional bombing would have continued or increased prior to an invasion. The submarine blockade and the United States Army Air Forces's mining operation, Operation Starvation, had effectively cut off Japan's imports. A complementary operation against Japan's railways was about to begin, isolating the cities of southern Honshū from the food grown elsewhere in the Home Islands. "Immediately after the defeat, some estimated that 10 million people were likely to starve to death", noted historian Daikichi Irokawa. Meanwhile, fighting continued in the Philippines, New Guinea and Borneo, and offensives were scheduled for September in southern China and Malaya. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria had, in the week before the surrender, caused over 80,000 deaths.

In September 1945, nuclear physicist Karl Taylor Compton, who himself took part in the Manhattan Project, visited MacArthur's headquarters in Tokyo, and following his visit wrote a defensive article, in which he summarized his conclusions as follows:

If the atomic bomb had not been used, evidence like that I have cited points to the practical certainty that there would have been many more months of death and destruction on an enormous scale.

Philippine justice Delfín Jaranilla, member of the Tokyo tribunal, wrote in his judgment:

According to military scholar Sarah Paine, the bombings likely saved millions of lives, as a quick end to the war enabled the resumption of food shipping which prevented further famine.

This Tokyo residential section was virtually destroyed following the Operation Meetinghouse fire-bombing of Tokyo on the night of 9/10 March 1945, which was the single deadliest air raid in human history;[42] with a greater loss of life than the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima or Nagasaki as single events or a greater civilian death toll and area of fire damage than both nuclear bombings combined.[43]

Chinese civilians massacred during Japan's campaign of total war in Xuzhou

Supporters of the bombings have argued the Japanese government had promulgated a National Mobilization Law and waged total war, ordering many civilians (including women, children, and old people) to work in factories and other infrastructure attached to the war effort and to fight against any invading force. Unlike the United States and Nazi Germany, over 90% of the Japanese war production was done in unmarked workshops and cottage industries which were widely dispersed within residential areas in cities and thus making them more extensively difficult to find and attack. In addition, the dropping of high explosives with precision bombing was unable to penetrate Japan's dispersed industry, making it entirely impossible to destroy them without causing widespread damage to surrounding areas. General Curtis LeMay stated why he ordered the systematic carpet bombing of Japanese cities:

For six months prior to the combat use of nuclear weapons, the United States Army Air Forces under LeMay's command undertook a major strategic bombing campaign against Japanese cities through the use of incendiary bombs, destroying 67 cities and killing an estimated 350,000 civilians. The Operation Meetinghouse raid on Tokyo on the night of 9/10 March 1945 stands as the deadliest air raid in human history, killing 100,000 civilians and destroying 16 square miles (41 km ²) of the city that night. The attack caused more civilian deaths and damage to urbanized land than any other single air attack, including the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.

Colonel Harry F. Cunningham, an intelligence officer of the Fifth Air Force, noted that in addition to civilians producing weapons of war in cities, the Japanese government created a large civilian militia organization in order to train millions of civilians to be armed and to resist the American invaders. In his official intelligence review on July 21, 1945, he declared that:

Supporters of the bombings have emphasized the strategic significance of the targets. Hiroshima was used as headquarters of the Second General Army and Fifth Division, which commanded the defense of southern Japan with 40,000 combatants stationed in the city. The city was also a communication center, an assembly area for combatants, a storage point, and had major industrial factories and workshops as well, and its air defenses consisted of five batteries of 7-cm and 8-cm (2.8 and 3.1 inch) anti-aircraft guns. Nagasaki was of great wartime importance because of its wide-ranging industrial activity, including the production of ordnance, warships, military equipment, and other war material. The city's air defenses consisted of four batteries of 7 cm (2.8 in) anti-aircraft guns and two searchlight batteries. An estimated 110,000 people were killed in the atomic bombings, including 20,000 Japanese combatants and 20,000 Korean slave laborers in Hiroshima and 23,145-28,113 Japanese factory workers, 2,000 Korean slave laborers, and 150 Japanese combatants in Nagasaki.

The Bockscar B-29 that was used to deliver the Fat Man bomb to Nagasaki and a post war Mk III nuclear weapon painted to resemble the Fat Man

On 30 June 2007, Japan's defense minister Fumio Kyūma said the dropping of atomic bombs on Japan by the United States during World War II was an inevitable way to end the war. Kyūma said: "I now have come to accept in my mind that in order to end the war, it could not be helped ( shikata ga nai) that an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki and that countless numbers of people suffered great tragedy." Kyūma, who is from Nagasaki, said the bombing caused great suffering in the city, but he does not resent the U.S. because it prevented the Soviet Union from entering the war with Japan. Kyūma's comments were similar to those made by Emperor Hirohito when, in his first ever press conference given in Tokyo in 1975, he was asked what he thought of the bombing of Hiroshima, and answered: "It's very regrettable that nuclear bombs were dropped and I feel sorry for the citizens of Hiroshima but it couldn't be helped (shikata ga nai) because that happened in wartime."

Commenting on the use of the atomic bomb, then- U.S. Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson stated, "The atomic bomb was more than a weapon of terrible destruction; it was a psychological weapon."

In 1959, Mitsuo Fuchida, the pilot who led the first wave in the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, met with General Paul Tibbets, who piloted the that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, and told him that:

Former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who worked as a USAAF statistic bomber analyst under LeMay's command at the time, stated in the documentary The Fog of War that brute force was sometimes necessary to quickly end the war:

I remember reading that General Sherman in the Civil War. The mayor of Atlanta pleaded with him to save the city. And Sherman essentially said to the mayor just before he torched it and burned it down: "War is cruel. War is cruelty." That was the way LeMay felt. He was trying to save the country. He was trying to save our nation. And in the process, he was prepared to do whatever killing was necessary. It's a very, very difficult position for sensitive human beings to be in.

Japan's leaders refused to surrender

Some historians see ancient Japanese warrior traditions as a major factor in the resistance in the Japanese military to the idea of surrender. According to one Air Force account,

The Japanese code of Bushido-the way of the warrior'-was deeply ingrained. The concept of Yamato-damashii equipped each soldier with a strict code: never be captured, never break down, and never surrender. Surrender was dishonorable. Each soldier was trained to fight to the death and was expected to die before suffering dishonor. Defeated Japanese leaders preferred to take their own lives in the painful samurai ritual of (called hara kiri in the West). Warriors who surrendered were deemed not worthy of regard or respect.

Japanese militarism was aggravated by the Great Depression, and had resulted in countless assassinations of reformers attempting to check military power, among them Takahashi Korekiyo, Saitō Makoto, and Inukai Tsuyoshi. This created an environment in which opposition to war was a much riskier endeavor.

According to historian Richard B. Frank,

The intercepts of Japanese Imperial Army and Navy messages disclosed without exception that Japan's armed forces were determined to fight a final Armageddon battle in the homeland against an Allied invasion. The Japanese called this strategy Ketsu Go (Operation Decisive). It was founded on the premise that American morale was brittle and could be shattered by heavy losses in the initial invasion. American politicians would then gladly negotiate an end to the war [based on terms] far more generous than unconditional surrender.

The United States Department of Energy's history of the Manhattan Project lends some credence to these claims, saying that military leaders in Japan

While some members of the civilian leadership did use covert diplomatic channels to attempt peace negotiation, they could not negotiate surrender or even a cease-fire. Japan could legally enter into a peace agreement only with the unanimous support of the Japanese cabinet, and in the summer of 1945, the Japanese Supreme War Council, consisting of representatives of the Army, the Navy, and the civilian government, could not reach a consensus on how to proceed.

A political stalemate developed between the military and civilian leaders of Japan, the military increasingly determined to fight despite all costs and odds and the civilian leadership seeking a way to negotiate an end to the war. Further complicating the decision was the fact no cabinet could exist without the representative of the Imperial Japanese Army. This meant the Army or Navy could veto any decision by having its Minister resign, thus making them the most powerful posts on the SWC. In early August 1945, the cabinet was equally split between those who advocated an end to the war on one condition, the preservation of the , and those who insisted on three other conditions:

1. Leave disarmament and demobilization to Imperial General Headquarters

2. No occupation of the Japanese Home Islands, Korea, or Formosa

3. Delegation to the Japanese government of the punishment of war criminals

The "hawks" consisted of General Korechika Anami, General Yoshijirō Umezu, and Admiral Soemu Toyoda and were led by Anami. The "doves" consisted of Prime Minister Kantarō Suzuki, Naval Minister Mitsumasa Yonai, and Minister of Foreign Affairs Shigenori Tōgō and were led by Togo. Under special permission of Hirohito, the president of the Privy council, Hiranuma Kiichirō, was also a member of the imperial conference. For him, the preservation of the kokutai implied not only the Imperial institution but also the Emperor's reign.

Japan had an example of unconditional surrender in the German Instrument of Surrender. On 26 July, Truman and other Allied leaders-except the Soviet Union-issued the Potsdam Declaration outlining terms of surrender for Japan. The declaration stated, "The alternative for Japan is prompt and utter destruction." It was not accepted, though there is debate on Japan's intentions. The Emperor, who was waiting for a Soviet reply to Japanese peace feelers, made no move to change the government position. In the PBS documentary "Victory in the Pacific" (2005), broadcast in the American Experience series, historian Donald Miller argues, in the days after the declaration, the Emperor seemed more concerned with moving the Imperial Regalia of Japan to a secure location than with "the destruction of his country". This comment is based on declarations made by the Emperor to Kōichi Kido on 25 and 31 July 1945, when he ordered the Lord Keeper of the Privy Seal of Japan to protect "at all cost" the Imperial Regalia.

It has sometimes been argued Japan would have surrendered if simply guaranteed the Emperor would be allowed to continue as formal head of state. However, Japanese diplomatic messages regarding a possible Soviet mediation-intercepted through Magic, and made available to Allied leaders-have been interpreted by some historians to mean, "the dominant militarists insisted on preservation of the old militaristic order in Japan, the one in which they ruled." On 18 and 20 July 1945, Ambassador Sato cabled to Foreign Minister Togo, strongly advocating that Japan accept an unconditional surrender provided that the U.S. preserved the imperial house (keeping the emperor). On 21 July, in response, Togo rejected the advice, saying that Japan would not accept an unconditional surrender under any circumstance. Togo then said that, "Although it is apparent that there will be more casualties on both sides in case the war is prolonged, we will stand as united against the enemy if the enemy forcibly demands our unconditional surrender." They also faced potential death sentences in trials for Japanese war crimes if they surrendered. This was also what occurred in the International Military Tribunal for the Far East and other tribunals. Further diplomatic cables suggest the Japanese ambassador in Moscow thought the Foreign Ministry in Tokyo had an unrealistic view of events.

History professor Robert James Maddox wrote:

Another myth that has attained wide attention is that at least several of Truman's top military advisers later informed him that using atomic bombs against Japan would be militarily unnecessary or immoral, or both. There is no persuasive evidence that any of them did so. None of the Joint Chiefs ever made such a claim, although one inventive author has tried to make it appear that Leahy did by braiding together several unrelated passages from the admiral's memoirs. Actually, two days after Hiroshima, Truman told aides that Leahy had 'said up to the last that it wouldn't go off.'

Neither MacArthur nor Nimitz ever communicated to Truman any change of mind about the need for invasion or expressed reservations about using the bombs. When first informed about their imminent use only days before Hiroshima, MacArthur responded with a lecture on the future of atomic warfare and even after Hiroshima strongly recommended that the invasion go forward. Nimitz, from whose jurisdiction the atomic strikes would be launched, was notified in early 1945. 'This sounds fine,' he told the courier, 'but this is only February. Can't we get one sooner?'

The best that can be said about Eisenhower's memory is that it had become flawed by the passage of time.

Notes made by one of Stimson's aides indicate that there was a discussion of atomic bombs, but there is no mention of any protest on Eisenhower's part.

Even after the triple shock of the Soviet intervention and two atomic bombs, the Japanese cabinet was still deadlocked, incapable of deciding upon a course of action due to the power of the Army and Navy factions in cabinet who were unwilling to even consider surrender. Following the personal intervention of the emperor to break the deadlock in favour of surrender, there were no fewer than three separate coup attempts by senior Japanese officers to try to prevent the surrender and take the Emperor into 'protective custody'. Once these coup attempts had failed, senior leaders of the air force and Navy ordered bombing and raids on the U.S. fleet (in which some Japanese generals personally participated) to try to derail any possibility of peace. It is clear from these accounts that while many in the civilian government knew the war could not be won, the power of the military in the Japanese government kept surrender from even being considered as a real option prior to the two atomic bombs.

Another argument is that it was the Soviet declaration of war in the days between the bombings that caused the surrender. After the war, Admiral Soemu Toyoda said, "I believe the Russian participation in the war against Japan rather than the atom bombs did more to hasten the surrender." Prime Minister Suzuki also declared that the entry of the USSR into the war made "the continuance of the war impossible". Upon hearing news of the event from Foreign Minister Togo, Suzuki immediately said, "Let us end the war", and agreed to finally convene an emergency meeting of the Supreme Council with that aim. The official British history, The War Against Japan, also writes the Soviet declaration of war "brought home to all members of the Supreme Council the realization that the last hope of a negotiated peace had gone and there was no alternative but to accept the Allied terms sooner or later". However, others have argued the Soviet declaration of war would not have come as a large shock to the Japanese leadership unlike the atomic bombings as they were aware of a Soviet military buildup in the Far East for months anticipating an eventual attack at a later date.

The "one condition" faction, led by Togo, seized on the bombing as decisive justification of surrender. Kōichi Kido, one of Emperor Hirohito's closest advisers, stated, "We of the peace party were assisted by the atomic bomb in our endeavor to end the war." Hisatsune Sakomizu, the chief Cabinet secretary in 1945, called the bombing "a golden opportunity given by heaven for Japan to end the war".

Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should We continue to fight, not only would it result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization. Such being the case, how are We to save the millions of Our subjects, or to atone Ourselves before the hallowed spirits of Our Imperial Ancestors? This is the reason why We have ordered the acceptance of the provisions of the Joint Declaration of the Powers.

During the war, and 1945 in particular, due to state secrecy, very little was known outside Japan about the slow progress of the Japanese nuclear weapon program. The US knew that Japan had requested materials from their German allies, and 560 kg (1,230 lb) of unprocessed uranium oxide was dispatched to Japan in April 1945 aboard the submarine U-234, which however surrendered to US forces in the Atlantic following Germany's surrender. The uranium oxide was reportedly labeled as "U-235", which may have been a mislabeling of the submarine's name; its exact characteristics remain unknown. Some sources believe that it was not weapons-grade material and was intended for use as a catalyst in the production of synthetic methanol to be used for aviation fuel.

If post-war analysis had found that Japanese nuclear weapons development was near completion, this discovery might have served in a revisionist sense to justify the atomic attack on Japan. However, it is known that the poorly coordinated Japanese project was considerably behind the US developments in 1945, and also behind the unsuccessful German nuclear energy project of WWII.

A review in 1986 of the fringe hypothesis that Japan had already created a nuclear weapon, by Department of Energy employee Roger M. Anders, appeared in the journal Military Affairs:

Post-World War II Japan, under the circumstance that the United States did not drop the two atomic weapons on Japan, could have seen a state of existence comparable to that of Korea and Germany, in the years of Soviet occupation on one side and Western occupation on the other. This would not be completely unthinkable due to the proposed Soviet invasion of Hokkaido, a planned invasion of the northernmost island of the Japanese home islands, which was supposed to start two months before the American invasion of Kyushu (the southernmost island). Had the Soviets actually commenced the aforementioned invasion and, for that matter, succeeded, they would gain a foothold in an island of immense strategic relevance. In that respect, the United States' (as well as their allies') plan, known as Operation Downfall, may have become a gambit in a situation that could be dangerous or perhaps deadly for the interests of the United States, its allies, or even the world.

While valid projections or viable predictions for such a situation are scarce, a detailed analysis of similar, empirically observed situations provides legitimate reasons to consider Soviet interference a valid concern. In many cases under the criteria that Soviet influence or occupation is observed on part of the country or region and Western influence seen on another, conflict erupted. A few examples of this would include: the Korean War, where a Soviet-backed North Korea invaded the pro-Western South Korea, and ultimately resulted in a multinational war with a UN coalition, primarily consisting of American forces, versus a joint North Korean- Chinese Communist Party force; the Berlin Blockade, where the Soviet Union sought to starve the pro-Western West Berlin into submission, but ultimately failed due to the Berlin Airlift; the Vietnam War, a Cold War proxy-conflict between the U.S. and Soviet Union, which pitted the pro-Communist North Vietnam against the American-backed South Vietnam; and other similar cases. In fact, the vacuum left after Japan's surrender in contested areas of China became a shady duel between communism and democracy, as Eugene Sledge writes in the book The Cold War: A Military History: "In northern China at this time were many different armed groups: Japanese, Japanese-trained and -equipped Chinese puppet-government soldiers, Chinese Communists, Chinese Nationalists, Chinese bandits, and U.S. Marines... In Lang Fang and many other areas, even the surrendered Japanese were allowed to retain their arms, under U.S. supervision, in order to help fight the Communists".

Assistant Secretary Bard was convinced that a standard bombardment and naval blockade would be enough to force Japan into surrendering. Even more, he had seen signs for weeks that the Japanese were actually already looking for a way out of the war. His idea was for the United States to tell the Japanese about the bomb, the impending Soviet entry into the war, and the fair treatment that citizens and the Emperor would receive at the coming Big Three conference. Before the bombing occurred, Bard pleaded with Truman to neither drop the bombs (at least not without warning the population first) nor to invade the entire country, proposing to stop the bloodshed.

The 1946 United States Strategic Bombing Survey in Japan, whose members included Paul Nitze, concluded the atomic bombs had been unnecessary to win the war. They said:

There is little point in attempting precisely to impute Japan's unconditional surrender to any one of the numerous causes which jointly and cumulatively were responsible for Japan's disaster. The time lapse between military impotence and political acceptance of the inevitable might have been shorter had the political structure of Japan permitted a more rapid and decisive determination of national policies. Nevertheless, it seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion.

Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.

This conclusion assumed conventional firebombing would have continued, with ever-increasing numbers of B-29s, and a greater level of destruction to Japan's cities and population. One of Nitze's most influential sources was Prince Fumimaro Konoe, who responded to a question asking whether Japan would have surrendered if the atomic bombs had not been dropped by saying resistance would have continued through November or December 1945.

Historians such as Bernstein, Hasegawa, and Newman have criticized Nitze for drawing a conclusion they say went far beyond what the available evidence warranted, in order to promote the reputation of the Air Force at the expense of the Army and Navy.

Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in his memoir The White House Years:

Other U.S. military officers who disagreed with the necessity of the bombings include General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy (the Chief of Staff to the President), Brigadier General Carter Clarke (the military intelligence officer who prepared intercepted Japanese cables for U.S. officials), Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz (Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet), Fleet Admiral William Halsey Jr. (Commander of the US Third Fleet), and even the man in charge of all strategic air operations against the Japanese home islands, then-Major General Curtis LeMay:

The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.

-  Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet,

The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons ... The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.

-  Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman, 1950,

The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.

The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment ... It was a mistake to ever drop it ... [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it.

Stephen Peter Rosen of Harvard believes that a submarine blockade would have been sufficient to force Japan to surrender.

Historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa wrote the atomic bombings themselves were not the principal reason for Japan's capitulation. Instead, he contends, it was the Soviet entry in the war on 8 August, allowed by the Potsdam Declaration signed by the other Allies. The fact the Soviet Union did not sign this declaration gave Japan reason to believe the Soviets could be kept out of the war. As late as 25 July, the day before the declaration was issued, Japan had asked for a diplomatic envoy led by Konoe to come to Moscow hoping to mediate peace in the Pacific. Konoe was supposed to bring a letter from the Emperor stating:

Ward Wilson wrote that "after Nagasaki was bombed only four major cities remained which could readily have been hit with atomic weapons", and that the Japanese Supreme Council did not bother to convene after the atomic bombings because they were barely more destructive than previous bombings. He wrote that instead, the Soviet declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria and South Sakhalin removed Japan's last diplomatic and military options for negotiating a conditional surrender, and this is what prompted Japan's surrender. He wrote that attributing Japan's surrender to a "miracle weapon", instead of the start of the Soviet invasion, saved face for Japan and enhanced the United States' world standing.

Prime Minister Suzuki said in August 1945 that Japan surrendered as quickly as possible to the United States because Japan expected the Soviet Union to invade and hold Hokkaido, an action which would "destroy the foundation of Japan".

Nowhere is this troubled sense of responsibility more acute, and surely nowhere has it been more prolix, than among those who participated in the development of atomic energy for military purposes. ... In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no over-statement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

-Robert Oppenheimer
1947 Arthur D. Little Memorial Lecture
A number of notable individuals and organizations have criticized the bombings, many of them characterizing them as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and/or state terrorism. Early critics of the bombings were Albert Einstein, Eugene Wigner and Leó Szilárd, who had together spurred the first bomb research in 1939 with a jointly written letter to President Roosevelt.

Szilárd, who had gone on to play a major role in the Manhattan Project, argued:

The cenotaph at the Hiroshima Peace Park is inscribed with the sentence: "Let all the souls here rest in peace; this mistake shall not be repeated." Although the sentence may seem ambiguous, it has been clarified that its intended agent is all of humanity, and the mistake referred to is war in general.[124]

A number of scientists who worked on the bomb were against its use. Led by Dr. James Franck, seven scientists submitted a report to the Interim Committee (which advised the President) in May 1945, saying:

Mark Selden writes, "Perhaps the most trenchant contemporary critique of the American moral position on the bomb and the scales of justice in the war was voiced by the Indian jurist Radhabinod Pal, a dissenting voice at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, who balked at accepting the uniqueness of Japanese war crimes. Recalling Kaiser Wilhelm II's account of his duty to bring World War I to a swift end-"everything must be put to fire and sword; men, women and children and old men must be slaughtered and not a tree or house be left standing." Pal observed:

This policy of indiscriminate murder to shorten the war was considered to be a crime. In the Pacific war under our consideration, if there was anything approaching what is indicated in the above letter of the German Emperor, it is the decision coming from the Allied powers to use the bomb. Future generations will judge this dire decision ... If any indiscriminate destruction of civilian life and property is still illegal in warfare, then, in the Pacific War, this decision to use the atom bomb is the only near approach to the directives of the German Emperor during the first World War and of the Nazi leaders during the second World War.

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, observing:

Selden concludes, "the Japanese protest correctly pointed to U.S. violations of internationally accepted principles of war with respect to the wholesale destruction of populations".

In 1963, the bombings were the subject of a judicial review in Ryuichi Shimoda et al. v. The State in Japan. On the 22nd anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the District Court of Tokyo ruled the use of nuclear weapons was not illegal in war, but issued an opinion in its obiter dictum that the act of dropping any bombs including atomic bombs on cities was at the time governed by the Hague Regulations on Land Warfare of 1907 and the Hague Draft Rules of Air Warfare of 1922-1923 and was therefore illegal.

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:

As the first combat use of nuclear weapons, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent to some the crossing of a crucial barrier. Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, wrote of President Truman: "He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species." Kuznick said the atomic bombing of Japan "was not just a war crime; it was a crime against humanity."

Takashi Hiraoka, mayor of Hiroshima, upholding nuclear disarmament, said in a hearing to The Hague International Court of Justice (ICJ): "It is clear that the use of nuclear weapons, which cause indiscriminate mass murder that leaves [effects on] survivors for decades, is a violation of international law". Iccho Itoh, the mayor of Nagasaki, declared in the same hearing:

Although bombings do not meet the definition of genocide, some consider the definition too strict, and argue the bombings do constitute genocide. For example, University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings states there is a consensus among historians to Martin Sherwin's statement, "[T]he Nagasaki bomb was gratuitous at best and genocidal at worst".

The scholar R. J. Rummel instead extends the definition of genocide to what he calls democide, and includes the major part of deaths from the atom bombings in these. His definition of democide includes not only genocide, but also an excessive killing of civilians in war, to the extent this is against the agreed rules for warfare; he argues the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes, and thus democide. Rummel quotes among others an official protest from the US government in 1938 to Japan, for its bombing of Chinese cities: "The bombing of non-combatant populations violated international and humanitarian laws." He also considers excess deaths of civilians in conflagrations caused by conventional means, such as in Tokyo, as acts of democide.

In 1967, Noam Chomsky described the atomic bombings as "among the most unspeakable crimes in history". Chomsky pointed to the complicity of the American people in the bombings, referring to the bitter experiences they had undergone prior to the event as the cause for their acceptance of its legitimacy.

In 2007, a group of intellectuals in Hiroshima established an unofficial body called International Peoples' Tribunal on the Dropping of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On 16 July 2007, it delivered its verdict, stating:

The Tribunal finds that the nature of damage caused by the atomic bombs can be described as indiscriminate extermination of all life forms or inflicting unnecessary pain to the survivors.

About the legality and the morality of the action, the unofficial tribunal found:

Historical accounts indicate the decision to use the atomic bombs was made in order to provoke a surrender of Japan by use of an awe-inspiring power. These observations have caused Michael Walzer to state the incident was an act of "war terrorism: the effort to kill civilians in such large numbers that their government is forced to surrender. Hiroshima seems to me the classic case." This type of claim eventually prompted historian Robert P. Newman, a supporter of the bombings, to say "there can be justified terror, as there can be just wars".

Certain scholars and historians have characterized the atomic bombings of Japan as a form of "state terrorism". This interpretation is based on a definition of terrorism as "the targeting of innocents to achieve a political goal". As Frances V. Harbour points out, the meeting of the Target Committee in Los Alamos on 10 and 11 May 1945 suggested targeting the large population centers of Kyoto or Hiroshima for a "psychological effect" and to make "the initial use sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized". As such, Professor Harbour suggests the goal was to create terror for political ends both in and beyond Japan. However, Burleigh Taylor Wilkins believes it stretches the meaning of " terrorism" to include wartime acts.

Historian Howard Zinn wrote that the bombings were terrorism. Zinn cites the sociologist Kai Erikson who said that the bombings could not be called "combat" because they targeted civilians. Just War theorist Michael Walzer said that while taking the lives of civilians can be justified under conditions of 'supreme emergency', the war situation at that time did not constitute such an emergency.

Tony Coady, Frances V. Harbour, and Jamal Nassar also view the targeting of civilians during the bombings as a form of terrorism. Nassar classifies the atomic bombings as terrorism in the same vein as the firebombing of Tokyo, the firebombing of Dresden, and the Holocaust.

Richard A. Falk, Professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Princeton University has written in detail about Hiroshima and Nagasaki as instances of state terrorism. He said that "the explicit function of the attacks was to terrorize the population through mass slaughter and to confront its leaders with the prospect of national annihilation".

Author Steven Poole said that the "people killed by terrorism" are not the targets of the intended terror effect. He said that the atomic bombings were "designed as an awful demonstration" aimed at Stalin and the government of Japan.

Alexander Werth, historian and BBC Eastern Front war correspondent, suggests that the nuclear bombing of Japan mainly served to demonstrate the new weapon in the most shocking way, virtually at the Soviet Union's doorstep, in order to prepare the political post-war field.

The Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano expressed regret in August 1945 that the bomb's inventors did not destroy the weapon for the benefit of humanity. Rev. Cuthbert Thicknesse, the Dean of St Albans, prohibited using St Albans Abbey for a thanksgiving service for the war's end, calling the use of atomic weapons "an act of wholesale, indiscriminate massacre". In 1946, a report by the Federal Council of Churches entitled Atomic Warfare and the Christian Faith, includes the following passage:

The bombers' chaplain, Father George Benedict Zabelka, would later renounce the bombings after visiting Nagasaki with two fellow chaplains.

Continuation of previous behavior

American historian Gabriel Kolko said certain discussion regarding the moral dimension of the attacks is wrong-headed, given the fundamental moral decision had already been made:

During November 1944 American B-29s began their first incendiary bomb raids on Tokyo, and on 9 March 1945, wave upon wave dropped masses of small incendiaries containing an early version of napalm on the city's population-for they directed this assault against civilians. Soon small fires spread, connected, grew into a vast firestorm that sucked the oxygen out of the lower atmosphere. The bomb raid was a 'success' for the Americans; they killed 125,000 Japanese in one attack. The Allies bombed Hamburg and Dresden in the same manner, and Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, and Tokyo again on May 24. The basic moral decision that the Americans had to make during the war was whether or not they would violate international law by indiscriminately attacking and destroying civilians, and they resolved that dilemma within the context of conventional weapons. Neither fanfare nor hesitation accompanied their choice, and in fact the atomic bomb used against Hiroshima was less lethal than massive fire bombing. The war had so brutalized the American leaders that burning vast numbers of civilians no longer posed a real predicament by the spring of 1945. Given the anticipated power of the atomic bomb, which was far less than that of fire bombing, no one expected small quantities of it to end the war. Only its technique was novel-nothing more. By June 1945 the mass destruction of civilians via strategic bombing did impress Stimson as something of a moral problem, but the thought no sooner arose than he forgot it, and in no appreciable manner did it shape American use of conventional or atomic bombs. "I did not want to have the United States get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities", he noted telling the President on June 6. There was another difficulty posed by mass conventional bombing, and that was its very success, a success that made the two modes of human destruction qualitatively identical in fact and in the minds of the American military. "I was a little fearful", Stimson told Truman, "that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength." To this the President "laughed and said he understood."

The second atomic bombing, on Nagasaki, came only three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, when the devastation at Hiroshima had yet to be fully comprehended by the Japanese. The lack of time between the bombings has led some historians to state that the second bombing was "certainly unnecessary", "gratuitous at best and genocidal at worst", and not jus in bello. In response to the claim that the atomic bombing of Nagasaki was unnecessary, Maddox wrote:

Jerome Hagen indicates that War Minister Anami's revised briefing was partly based on interrogating captured American pilot Marcus McDilda. Under torture, McDilda reported that the Americans had 100 atomic bombs, and that Tokyo and Kyoto would be the next atomic bomb targets. Both were lies; McDilda was not involved or briefed on the Manhattan Project and simply told the Japanese what he thought they wanted to hear.

One day before the bombing of Nagasaki, the Emperor notified Foreign Minister Shigenori Tōgō of his desire to "insure a prompt ending of hostilities". Tōgō wrote in his memoir that the Emperor "warned [him] that since we could no longer continue the struggle, now that a weapon of this devastating power was used against us, we should not let slip the opportunity [to end the war] by engaging in attempts to gain more favorable conditions". The Emperor then requested Tōgō to communicate his wishes to the Prime Minister.

Historian James J. Weingartner sees a connection between the American mutilation of Japanese war dead and the bombings. According to Weingartner both were partially the result of a dehumanization of the enemy. "[T]he widespread image of the Japanese as sub-human constituted an emotional context which provided another justification for decisions which resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands." On the second day after the bombing of Nagasaki, President Truman had stated: "The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him like a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true".

Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission was a commission established in 1946 in accordance with a presidential directive from Harry S. Truman. This organization investigated the health of the Hibakusha, but did not treat them at all. As a result, it has been criticized by the Hibakusha as being experimental on the human body. The Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission also focused on the Nishiyama area of Nagasaki. The Nishiyama area of Nagasaki was located in the mountains, and although it was not damaged by the atomic bomb explosion, it was an area where the human body was exposed to radiation. Therefore, health surveys were conducted after the war without informing the population of their purpose. Initially, the Nishiyama area was surveyed by the U.S. Army, but was later turned over to ABCC.

The people in the Nishiyama area showed a significant increase in white blood cell counts a few months after the atomic bombings. In animals, leukemia can develop after whole-body exposure, so it is particularly interesting to see what happens in humans, and osteosarcoma has also been identified in humans after oral ingestion of radioactive materials.

Given these conditions, the residents of the Nishiyama area, who were not directly affected by the atomic bombings, are an ideal population to observe the effects of residual radiation.

At the time of the atomic bombings, there was no international treaty or instrument protecting a civilian population specifically from attack by aircraft. Many critics of the atomic bombings point to the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 as setting rules in place regarding the attack of civilian populations. The Hague Conventions contained no specific air warfare provisions but it prohibited the targeting of undefended civilians by naval artillery, field artillery, or siege engines, all of which were classified as " bombardment". However, the Conventions allowed the targeting of military establishments in cities, including military depots, industrial plants, and workshops which could be used for war. This set of rules was not followed during World War I which saw bombs dropped indiscriminately on cities by Zeppelins and multi-engine bombers. Afterward, another series of meetings were held at The Hague in 1922-23, but no binding agreement was reached regarding air warfare. During the 1930s and 1940s, the aerial bombing of cities was resumed, notably by the German Condor Legion against the cities of Guernica and Durango in Spain in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. This led to an escalation of various cities bombed, including Chongqing, Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo. All of the major belligerents in World War II dropped bombs on civilians in cities.

Modern debate over the applicability of the Hague Conventions to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki revolves around whether the Conventions can be assumed to cover modes of warfare that were at the time unknown; whether rules for artillery bombardment can be applied to rules for aerial bombing. As well, the debate hinges on to what degree the Hague Conventions was being followed by the warring countries.

If the Hague Conventions is admitted as applicable, the critical question becomes whether the bombed cities met the definition of "undefended". Some observers consider Hiroshima and Nagasaki undefended, some say that both cities were legitimate military targets, and others say that Hiroshima could be considered a legitimate military target while Nagasaki was comparatively undefended. Hiroshima has been argued as not a legitimate target because the major industrial plants were just outside the target area. It has also been argued as a legitimate target because Hiroshima was the headquarters of the regional Second General Army and Fifth Division with 40,000 combatants stationed in the city. Both cities were protected by anti-aircraft guns, which is an argument against the definition of "undefended".

The Hague Conventions prohibited poison weapons. The radioactivity of the atomic bombings has been described as poisonous, especially in the form of nuclear fallout which kills more slowly. However, this view was rejected by the International Court of Justice in 1996, which stated that the primary and exclusive use of ( air burst) nuclear weapons is not to poison or asphyxiate and thus is not prohibited by the Geneva Protocol.

The Hague Conventions also prohibited the employment of "arms, projectiles, or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering". The Japanese government cited this prohibition on 10 August 1945 after submitting a letter of protest to the United States denouncing the use of atomic bombs. However, the prohibition only applied to weapons as lances with a barbed head, irregularly shaped bullets, projectiles filled with glass, the use of any substance on bullets that would tend unnecessarily to inflame a wound inflicted by them, along with grooving bullet tips or the creation of soft point bullets by filing off the ends of the hard coating on full metal jacketed bullets.

It however did not apply to the use of explosives contained in artillery projectiles, mines, aerial torpedoes, or hand grenades. In 1962 and in 1963, the Japanese government retracted its previous statement by saying that there was no international law prohibiting the use of atomic bombs.

The Hague Conventions stated that religious buildings, art and science centers, charities, hospitals, and historic monuments were to be spared as far as possible in a bombardment, unless they were being used for military purposes. Critics of the atomic bombings point to many of these kinds of structures which were destroyed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. However, the Hague Conventions also stated that for the destruction of the enemy's property to be justified, it must be "imperatively demanded by the necessities of war". Because of the inaccuracy of heavy bombers in World War II, it was not practical to target military assets in cities without damage to civilian targets.

Even after the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, no international treaty banning or condemning nuclear warfare has ever been ratified.[dubious ] The closest example is a resolution by the UN General Assembly which stated that nuclear warfare was not in keeping with the UN charter, passed in 1953 with a vote of 25 to 20, and 26 abstentions.

The mainstream position in the United States from 1945 to the 1960s regarded the bombings as the decisive factor in ending the war, which has been termed by commentators as the "traditionalist" view or pejoratively as the "patriotic orthodoxy."

Some, on the other hand, see the Soviet invasion of Manchuria as primary or decisive. In the US, Robert Pape and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa have particularly advanced this view, which some have found convincing, but others have criticized it.

Robert Pape also argues:

In Japanese writing about the surrender, many accounts consider the Soviet entry into the war as the primary reason or as having equal importance with the atomic bombs, and others, such as the work of Sadao Asada, give primacy to the atomic bombings, particularly their impact on the emperor. The primacy of the Soviet entry as a reason for surrender is a longstanding view by some Japanese historians, and it has appeared in some Japanese junior high school textbooks.

The argument about the Soviet role in Japan's surrender has a connection with the argument about the Soviet role in America's decision to drop the bomb. Both arguments emphasize the importance of the Soviet Union. The former suggests that Japan surrendered to the US out of fear of the Soviet Union, and the latter emphasizes that the US dropped the bombs to intimidate the Soviet Union. Soviet accounts of the ending of the war emphasised the role of the Soviet Union. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia summarised events thus:

In August 1945 American military air forces dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima (6 August) and of Nagasaki (9 August). These bombings were not caused by military necessity, and served primarily political aims. They inflicted enormous damage on the peaceable population.

Fulfilling the obligations entered into by agreement with its allies and aiming for a very speedy ending of the second world war, the Soviet government on 8 August 1945 declared that from 9 August 1945 the USSR would be in a state of war against [Japan], and associated itself with the 1945 Potsdam declaration... of the governments of the USA, Great Britain and China of 26 July 1945, which demanded the unconditional capitulation of [Japan] and foreshadowed the bases of its subsequent demilitarization and democratization. The attack by Soviet forces, smashing the Kwantung Army and liberating Manchuria, Northern Korea, Southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, led to the rapid conclusion of the war in the Far East. On 2 September 1945 [Japan] signed the act of unconditional capitulation.

Japan had declared its surrender three days before the August 18 Soviet invasion of the Kuril Islands, which received comparatively little military opposition because of the earlier declaration to surrender.

The Soviet Navy was regarded by certain people as chronically lacking the naval capability to invade the home islands of Japan, despite having received numerous ships under loan from the US.

Still others have argued that war-weary Japan would likely have surrendered regardless because of a collapse of the economy; the lack of army, food, and industrial materials; threat of internal revolution; and the talk of surrender since earlier in the year. However, others find it unlikely and argue that Japan could likely have put up a spirited resistance.

The Japanese historian Sadao Asada argues that the ultimate decision to surrender was a personal decision by the emperor, who was influenced by the atomic bombings.

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A further argument, discussed under the rubric of "atomic diplomacy" and advanced in a 1965 book of that name by Gar Alperovitz, is that the bombings had as primary purpose to intimidate the Soviet Union and were the opening shots of the Cold War. Along those lines, some argue that the United States hoped to drop the bombs and receive surrender from Japan before a Soviet entry into the Pacific War. However, the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Kingdom came to an agreement at the Yalta Conference on when the Soviet Union should join the war against Japan and on how the territory of Japan was to be divided at the end of the war.

Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall argue the two bombs were dropped for different reasons:

The Pew Research Center conducted a 2015 survey showing that 56% of Americans supported the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and 34% opposed. The study highlighted the impact of the respondents' generations, showing that support for the bombings was 70% among Americans 65 and older but only 47% for those between 18 and 29. Political leanings also impacted responses, according to the survey; support was measured at 74% for Republicans and 52% for Democrats.

American approval of the bombings has decreased substantially since 1945, when a Gallup poll showed 85% support while only 10% disapproved. Forty-five years later, in 1990, Gallup conducted another poll and found 53% support and 41% opposition. Another Gallup poll in 2005 echoed the findings of the 2015 Pew Research Center study by finding 57% support with 38% opposition. While the poll data from the Pew Research Center and Gallup show a stark drop in support for the bombings over the last half-century, Stanford political scientists have conducted research supporting their hypothesis that American public support for the use of nuclear force would be just as high today as in 1945 if a similar yet contemporary scenario presented itself.

In a 2017 study conducted by political scientists Scott D. Sagan and Benjamin A. Valentino, respondents were asked if they would support the use of atomic force in a hypothetical situation that kills 100,000 Iranian civilians versus an invasion that would result in the deaths of 20,000 American soldiers. The results showed that 59% of Americans would approve of a nuclear strike in such a situation. However, a 2010 Pew survey showed that 64% of Americans approved of Barack Obama's declaration that the US would abstain from the use of nuclear weapons against nations that did not have them.

1. ^ Giangreco, Dennis M. (1998-02-16). "Transcript of "Operation Downfall [U.S. invasion of Japan]: US Plans and Japanese Counter-Measures"". Beyond Bushido: Recent Work in Japanese Military History. Archived from the original on 2012-04-15.

2. The Final Months of the War With Japan. Part V: ^ Did the SIGINT Picture Affect the Discussions at Potsdam? [1]

3. ^ "Battle for Iwo Jima, 1945". The Navy Department Library. 16 January 2008. Archived from the original on 6 December 2006.

4. Giangreco, Dennis M. & Moore, Kathryn, "Are New Purple Hearts Being Manufactured to Meet the Demand?"; History News Network (December 1, 2003), Retrieved December 4, 2006

5. ^ Frank 1999, p. 163.
This justification of "saving lives" was never used by Truman in the weeks following the strikes, and there was no need to: the American public viewed the nuclear attacks positively. It did surface years afterwards in his memoirs: during the interim, of course, questions had been raised about the necessity and morality of his decision to drop atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. See Miles 1985, p. 1: "Even when secret wartime documents were declassified, historians did not focus on the striking inconsistencies between these documents and those parts of the principal decision-makers' memoirs that dealt with estimates of lives saved." Miles, a veteran government official and former senior fellow of the Wilson Center, described the notion that Hiroshima saved 500,000 American military and numerous other deaths simply as a "myth".

6. Hanson, Victor Davis (2005-08-05). "60 Years Later: Considering Hiroshima". National Review.

7. ^ [https://web.archive.org/web/20120302153101/http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/17724/page5/ Archived 2012-03-02 at the Wayback Machine Freeman Dyson. Part I: A Failure of Intelligence. Technology Review, November 1, 2006, MIT

8. ^ David McNeill. The night hell fell from the sky. Japan Focus, 10 March 2005 Archived December 5, 2008, at the Wayback Machine.

9. ^ Frank 1999, p. 351; citing Irokawa, The Age of Hirohito: In Search of Modern Japan (1995), p. 37.

10. Karl T. Compton, ^ "If the Atomic Bomb Had Not Been Used", The Atlantic Monthly, December 1946. (Italics in the original.)

11. ^ Brian M. Mazanec (November 1, 2015). Evolution of Cyber War: International Norms for Emerging-Technology Weapons. Potomac Books. p. 96. ISBN 978-1612-3476-39.

12. ^ Nuke-Rebuke: Writers & Artists Against Nuclear Energy & Weapons (The Contemporary anthology series). The Spirit That Moves Us Press. May 1, 1984. pp. 22-29.

13. ^ "Japanese Defense Chief: Atomic Bombing 'Couldn't Be Helped'". Fox News. 30 June 2007. Archived from the original on 12 July 2007.

14. ^ Rezelman, David; Gosling, F.G.; Fehner, Terrence R. (2000). "Japan Surrenders, August 10-15, 1945". The Manhattan Project: An Interactive History. U.S. Department of Energy. Archived from the original on 2006-09-29.

15. ^ Maga, Timothy P. (2001). Judgment at Tokyo: the Japanese War Crimes Trials. University Press of Kentucky. pp. 51-52. ISBN 978-0-8131-2177-2.

16. ^ Home, R.W.; Low, Morris F. (September 1993). "Postwar Scientific Intelligence Missions to Japan". Isis. 84 (3): 527-37. doi:10.1086/356550. S2CID 144114888.

17. ^ Grunden, Walter E. (1998). "Hungnam and the Japanese Atomic Bomb: Recent Historiography of a Postwar Myth". Intelligence and National Security. 13 (2): 32-60. doi:10.1080/02684529808432475.

18. ^ Newman, Robert P. (1995). "Ending the War with Japan: Paul Nitze's "Early Surrender" Counterfactual". Pacific Historical Review. 64 (2): 167-194. doi:10.2307/3640894. ISSN 0030-8684. JSTOR 3640894.

19. Freeman, Robert (6 August 2005). "Was the Atomic Bombing of Japan Necessary?". Common Dreams.

20. ^ "United States Strategic Bombing Survey; Summary Report" (Transcription of original work). Report. United States Government Printing Office. 1946. p. 29.

21. Richard Frank: ^ Review of Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, Racing the Enemy (2006).
Frank states: I do think, however, that buried in the mass of USSBS work was evidence not cited in the summary report that there was yet another scenario that might have produced surrender without the atomic bombs or Soviet entry. And I believe there is a reason why, if the author or authors of that opinion had this evidence in mind, they chose not to refer to it explicitly. The additional evidence submerged within the USSBS reports concerns the new August 11 strategic bombing directive. This reoriented the B-29 campaign away from urban incendiary attacks in favor of a massive attack on Japan's railroad system. This new bombing campaign coupled with Japan's extremely dire food situation does raise a legitimate question as to whether Japan might have surrendered without the atomic bombs or Soviet entry.

22. ^ Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi. "The Atomic Bombs and the Soviet Invasion: What Drove Japan's Decision to Surrender?". Japan Focus. Archived from the original on February 14, 2009.

23. Manchester, William. ^ American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, Dell, p. 512

24. ^ Holmes, James (July-August 2014). "Hail to the Deep: A Strategy for SubmarinesHail to the Deep: A Strategy for Submarines". The National Interest (132).

25. ^ "Shimoda case (Compensation claim against Japan brought by the residents of Hiroshmina & Nagasaki), Tokyo District Court, 7 December 1963". International Committee of the Red Cross.

26. The Japanese Annual of International Law: Volume 36. International Law Association of Japan. 1994. p. 147.

27. ^ Falk, Richard A. (1965-02-15). "The Claimants of Hiroshima". The Nation. reprinted inRichard A. Falk; Saul H. Mendlovitz, eds. (1966). "The Shimoda Case: Challenge and Response". The Strategy of World Order. Volume: 1. New York: World Law Fund. pp. 307-13.

28. ^ Carroll 2006, p. 533 n233.
On p. 97, Carroll proceeds to note the words of Freeman Dyson in this regard: "'They [Nazi officials] had sat in their offices, writing memoranda and calculating how to murder people efficiently, just like me. The main difference was that they were sent to jail or hanged as war criminals, while I went free.' It can seem outrageous to equate Allied officers with perpetrators of the anti-Jewish genocide, but the obligation to maintain a moral standard in war is universal, even if the Nazi violation of that standard was unique in its barbarity."

29. November 1995 Public Sitting, in the Case of Legality of the Use by a State of Nuclear Weapons in Armed Conflicts Archived 2004-07-11 at the Wayback Machine at La Hague International Court of Justice

30. ^ Chomsky 1967a; Chomsky 1967b: "And, quite properly, he turns the question back to us: To what extent are the British or American people responsible for the vicious terror bombings of civilians, perfected as a technique of warfare by the Western democracies and reaching their culmination in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, surely among the most unspeakable crimes in history. To an undergraduate in 1945-46-to anyone whose political and moral consciousness had been formed by the horrors of the 1930s, by the war in Ethiopia, the Russian purge, the 'China Incident', the Spanish Civil War, the Nazi atrocities, the Western reaction to these events and, in part, complicity in them-these questions had particular significance and poignancy.'"

31. ^ "Judgement of the International Peoples' Tribunal on the Dropping of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki" (PDF). Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-04.

32. ^ Record Group 77, Records of the Office of the Chief of Engineers, Manhattan Engineer District, TS Manhattan Project File (1945-05-26). "Minutes of the second meeting of the Target Committee". It was agreed that psychological factors in the target selection were of great importance. Two aspects of this are (1) obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan and (2) making the initial use sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it is released. B. In this respect Kyoto has the advantage of the people being more highly intelligent and hence better able to appreciate the significance of the weapon. Hiroshima has the advantage of being such a size and with possible focusing from nearby mountains that a large fraction of the city may be destroyed. The Emperor's palace in Tokyo has a greater fame than any other target but is of least strategic value.

33. ^ Marty 1996, p. 117; Cox 1997, pp. 26-7.
Some American educationalists have argued that their country's failure to accept the profound immorality of the attacks and to understand the suffering they caused has led to "insane scenarios" of celebrating the bombs' use. See, for example, Kazemek 1994, p. 531: "Martin Luther King, Jr., contended that 'it is wrong to use immoral means to attain moral ends.' ... [D]uring Desert Storm, many Americans saw nothing wrong with using tactical nuclear weapons if necessary. And in a frighteningly insane scenario that might have come straight from Kurt Vonnegut, the crew of the Enola Gay has made a national tour of shopping malls - signing autographs and selling Enola Gay coffee mugs, photographs, videos, and copies of the order authorizing the use of the atomic bomb. We can only shake our heads in wonder."

34. References
Okamoto, Mitsou. "War Memories or History: The Enola Gay Debate and the Peace Prayer Memorial". Peace Studies Association Conference, Tufts University, 10 March 1994.

35. Elmar Rauch (1984). "The Protocol Additional to the Geneva Conventions for the Protection of Victims of International Armed Conflicts and the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea: Repercussions on the Law of Naval Warfare". Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Internationales Recht an der Universität Kiel. 90. Berlin: 67. ISBN 978-3-428-05703-0.

36. ^ John Burroughs (1997). The legality of Threat Or Use of Nuclear Weapons: A Guide to the Historic Opinion of the International Court of Justice. Lit Verlag. pp. 24-25. ISBN 978-3-8258-3516-3.

37. Frank, Richard B. (2005-08-08). "Why Truman Dropped the Bomb". The Weekly Standard. 010 (44). Archived from the original on 2012-09-14..

38. ^ Wilson, Ward (2007). "The Winning Weapon?: Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in Light of Hiroshima" (PDF). International Security. 31 (4): 163-164. doi:10.1162/isec.2007.31.4.162. ISSN 1531-4804. S2CID 57563920. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-04. From the Japanese perspective, the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and other Japanese-held territory was the event that dramatically changed the strategic landscape and left Japan with no option but to surrender unconditionally. The Hiroshima bombing was simply an extension of an already fierce bombing campaign.

39. ^ Review of Racing the Enemy by Gar Alperovitz in H-Diplo Roundtable Volume VII, No. 2, 2006, p. 2, footnote 1, citing research by Ayako Doi and Kimi Yoshida (bottom of page 7).

40. ^ "Япония" [Japan]. Большая советская энциклопедия (in Russian). Советская Энциклопедия. В августе 1945 американские военно-воздушные силы сбросили атомные бомбы на города Хиросима (6 августа) и Нагасаки (9 августа). Эти бомбардировки не вызывались военной необходимостью и преследовали прежде всего политические цели. Они повлекли огромные жертвы среди мирного населения. Выполняя обязательства, взятые на себя по соглашениям с союзниками, и стремясь к быстрейшему окончанию 2-й мировой войны, Советское правительство 8 августа 1945 объявило, что с 9 августа 1945 СССР будет находиться в состоянии войны с Я., и присоединилось к Потсдамской декларации 1945 ... правительств США, Великобритании и Китая от 26 июля 1945, требовавшей безоговорочной капитуляции Я. и намечавшей основы её последующей демилитаризации и демократизации. Наступление советских войск, разгромивших Квантунскую армию и освободивших Маньчжурию, Северную Корею, Южный Сахалин и Курильские острова, привело к быстрому завершению войны на Дальнем Востоке. 2 сентября 1945 Я. подписала акт о безоговорочной капитуляции.

41. ^ Alperovitz 2004.
Alperovitz's thesis met with disagreement from across the spectrum, but subsequent research confirmed key parts of it. See Walker 1996, pp. 13ff.

42. ^ Sagan, Scott D.; Valentino, Benjamin A. (2017-08-10). "Revisiting Hiroshima in Iran: What Americans Really Think about Using Nuclear Weapons and Killing Noncombatants". International Security. 42 (1): 41-79. doi:10.1162/ISEC_a_00284. ISSN 1531-4804. S2CID 57563501.

Anders, Roger M. (1986). "Military Library: Nuclear America by Gerard H. Clarfield and William M. Wiecek; Japan's Secret War by Robert K. Wilcox". Military Affairs. 50 (1): 56-57. doi:10.2307/1988558. JSTOR 1988558.

Appleman, Roy E.; Burns, James M.; Gugeler, Russell A.; Stevens, John (2000). Okinawa: The Last Battle. Washington, DC: United States Army Center of Military History. Archived from the original on 2009-09-26.

Axinn, Sidney (1986). "Honor, Patriotism, and Ultimate Loyalty". In Avner Cohen; Steven Lee (eds.). Nuclear Weapons and the Future of Humanity: The Fundamental Questions. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Allanheld. pp. 273-288. ISBN 978-0-847-67258-5.

Bevan, Robert (2007). The Destruction of Memory: Architecture at War. London: Reaktion Books. ISBN 978-1-861-89638-4.

Chomsky, Noam (1967a). "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". The New York Review of Books. 8 (3). Archived from the original on 20 February 2014.

Chomsky, Noam (1967b). "An Exchange on 'The Responsibility of Intellectuals'". The New York Review of Books. 8 (7). Archived from the original on 13 May 2008.

Coughlin, William (1953). "The Great Mokusatsu Mistake: Was This the Deadliest Error of Our Time?". Harper's Magazine. Vol. 206, no. 1234. pp. 31-40. ISSN 0017-789X.

Dower, John W. (1995). "The Bombed: Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japanese Memory". Diplomatic History. 19 (2).

Eisenhower, Dwight D. (1963). The White House Years; Mandate For Change: 1953-1956. New York: Doubleday & Company.

Groves, Leslie (1962). Now it Can be Told: The Story of the Manhattan Project. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 978-0-306-70738-4. OCLC 537684.

Grunden, Walter E. (1998). "Hungnam and the Japanese Atomic Bomb: Recent Historiography of a Postwar Myth". Intelligence and National Security. 13 (2): 32-60. doi:10.1080/02684529808432475.

Harbour, Frances Vryling (1999). Thinking About International Ethics: Moral Theory and Cases from American Foreign Policy. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. ISBN 978-0-813-32847-8.

Home, R. W.; Low, Morris F. (1993). "Postwar Scientific Intelligence Missions to Japan". . 84 (3): 527-37. doi:10.1086/356550. JSTOR 235645. S2CID 144114888.

Kazemek, Francis E. (1994). "'Two Handfuls of Bone and Ash': Teaching Our Children about Hiroshima". Phi Delta Kappan. 75 (7): 531-34. JSTOR 20405161.

Kolko, Gabriel (1990) [1968]. The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945. New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-679-72757-6.

Kort, Michael (2006). "Racing the Enemy: A Critical Look". Historically Speaking. 7 (3): 22-24. doi:10.1353/hsp.2006.0088. S2CID 145562448.

Leahy, William D. (1950). I was there. New York: McGraw Hill Book Company.

Levering, Ralph B. (2007). "Book Review: Racing the Enemy by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa". Journal of American History. 94 (1): 329. doi:10.2307/25094908. JSTOR 25094908.

Maddox, Robert James (1995). "The Biggest Decision: Why We Had to Drop the Atomic Bomb". American Heritage. 46 (3).

Miles, Rufus E. (1985). "Hiroshima: The Strange Myth of Half a Million American Lives Saved". International Security. 10 (2): 121-140. doi:10.2307/2538830. JSTOR 2538830. S2CID 154488751.

Oppenheimer, J. Robert (1948). "Physics in the contemporary world". Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. 4 (3): 65-68, 85-86. Bibcode:1948BuAtS...4c..65O. doi:10.1080/00963402.1948.11460172.

Rice, Sarah (2005). "Book Notes: The Genocidal Temptation: Auschwitz, Hiroshima, Rwanda and Beyond by Robert S. Frey, ed". Harvard Human Rights Journal. 18: 289ff.

Walker, J. Samuel (2005). "Recent Literature on Truman's Atomic Bomb Decision: A Search for Middle Ground". Diplomatic History. 29 (2): 311-34. doi:10.1111/j.1467-7709.2005.00476.x.

Weingartner, James J. (1992). "Trophies of War: U.S. Troops and the Mutilation of Japanese War Dead, 1941-1945". Pacific Historical Review. 61 (1): 53-67. doi:10.2307/3640788. JSTOR 3640788.

Wilson, Ward (2007). "The Winning Weapon? Rethinking Nuclear Weapons in the Light of Hiroshima" (PDF). International Security. 31 (4): 162-79. doi:10.1162/isec.2007.31.4.162. S2CID 57563920. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-04.

Wolk, Herman S. (2010). Cataclysm : General Hap Arnold and the Defeat of Japan. Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press. ISBN 978-1-57441-281-9.

Alperovitz, Gar (1995). The Decision To Use The Atomic Bomb And The Architecture Of An American Myth. Knopf. ISBN 978-0-679-44331-5. Weighs whether the bombings were justified or necessary, concludes they were not.

Bernstein, Barton J., ed. (1976). The Atomic Bomb: The Critical Issues. Little, Brown. ISBN 978-0-316-09192-3. Weighs whether the bombings were justified or necessary.

Feis, Herbert (1961). Japan Subdued: The Atomic Bomb and the End of the War in the Pacific. Princeton University Press. Concludes that the bombs were not only necessary, but legally and morally acceptable (1966 reprint).

Frank, Richard B. (1999). Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire. Random House. ISBN 978-0-679-41424-7. Based on previously classified documents. Concludes that the dropping the bombs was superior to all other alternatives and saved Japanese as well as American lives.

Fussell, Paul (1988). Thank God For The Atom Bomb, And Other Essays. Summit Books. ISBN 978-0-345-36135-6. Exceedingly Orthodox article, defends the bomb but not a serious academic work.

Grayling, A. C. (2006). Among the Dead Cities. Walker Publishing Company. ISBN 978-0-8027-1471-8. Philosophical and moral discussion concerning the Allied strategy of area bombing in World War II, including the use of atomic weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi (2005). Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. Belknap Press. ISBN 978-0-674-01693-4. Argues that the bombs were not the deciding factor in ending the war. The Soviet entrance into the Pacific War was the primary cause for Japan's surrender.

Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi (17 August 2007). "The Atomic Bombs and the Soviet Invasion: What Drove Japan's Decision to Surrender?". Japan Focus. Here he sharpens his earlier view that the Soviet entrance into the Pacific War was the primary cause for Japan's surrender.

Maddox, Robert James (1995). Weapons for Victory: The Hiroshima Decision. University of Missouri Press. ISBN 978-0-8262-1562-8. Author is a diplomatic historian who favors Truman's decision to drop the atomic bombs.

Newman, Robert P. (1995). Truman and the Hiroshima Cult. Michigan State University Press. ISBN 978-0-87013-403-6. An analysis critical of postwar opposition to the atom bombings.

Covers the controversy over the content of the 1995 Smithsonian Institution exhibition associated with the display of the Enola Gay; includes complete text of the planned (and canceled) exhibition.

Takaki, Ronald (1995). Hiroshima: Why America Dropped the Atomic Bomb. Little, Brown. ISBN 978-0-316-83124-6.

Hiroshima: Was It Necessary?

Reflections of a Far East Prisoner of War on the use of the atomic bombs

Annotated bibliography on the decision to use the atomic bombs on Japan Archived 2008-07-03 at the Wayback Machine - The Alsos Digital Library for Nuclear Issues

Atomic Bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, archive of contemporary reactions and subsequent analises at marxists.org

Unconditional Surrender, Demobilization, and the Atomic Bomb by Michael D. Pearlman U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Fort Leavenworth, KS

"The Obliteration of Hiroshima", Stephen Shalom (from New Politics, vol. 6, no. 1 (new series), whole no. 21, Summer 1996)

Hiroshima: the 'White Man's Bomb' revisited: Dropping the Bomb on Japan was the final act of a bitter race war in the Pacific. by Mick Hume, , 2 August 2005. Abridged version of a 1995 article in Living Marxism.

Yuki Tanaka and Richard Falk, "The Atomic Bombing, The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal and the Shimoda Case: Lessons for Anti-Nuclear Legal Movements", The Asia-Pacific Journal, Vol. 44-3-09, 2 November 2009.

The Enola Gay Controversy - About - Overview

International Peoples' Tribunal on the Dropping of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Dietrich, Bill (1995). "Pro and Con on Dropping the Bomb". Seattle Times.

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Debate over the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - Wikipedia

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Substantial debate exists over the ethical, legal, and military aspects of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6 August and 9 August 1945 at the close of World War II (1939-45). On 26 July 1945 at the Potsdam Conference, United States President Harry S.

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offers reasons for and against dropping the atomic bomb

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His decision was mainly based on the estimate of half a million Allied casualties likely to be caused by invading the home islands of Japan. There was also the likely death rate from starvation for Allied PoWs and civilians as the war dragged on well into 1946.

What Truman did not know, and which has only been established quite recently, is that the Imperial Japanese Army could never contemplate surrender, having forced all their men to fight to the death since the start of the war. All civilians were to be mobilised and forced to fight with bamboo spears and satchel charges to act as suicide bombers against Allied tanks. Japanese documents apparently indicate their army was prepared to accept up to 28 million civilian deaths.
Antony Beevor is a bestselling military historian, specialising in the Second World War. His most recent book is Ardennes 1944: Hitler's Last Gamble (Viking, 2015)
"No. It was immoral, and unnecessary" - Richard Overy

The dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima was justified at the time as being moral - in order to bring about a more rapid victory and prevent the deaths of more Americans. However, it was clearly not moral to use this weapon knowing that it would kill civilians and destroy the urban milieu. And it wasn't necessary either.

Militarily Japan was finished (as the Soviet invasion of Manchuria that August showed). Further blockade and urban destruction would have produced a surrender in August or September at the latest, without the need for the costly anticipated invasion or the atomic bomb. As for the second bomb on Nagasaki, that was just as unnecessary as the first one. It was deemed to be needed, partly because it was a different design, and the military (and many civilian scientists) were keen to see if they both worked the same way. There was, in other words, a cynical scientific imperative at work as well.

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I should also add that there was a fine line between the atomic bomb and conventional bombing - indeed descriptions of Hamburg or Tokyo after conventional bombing echo the aftermath of Hiroshima. To regard Hiroshima as a moral violation is also to condemn the firebombing campaign, which was deliberately aimed at city centres and completely indiscriminate.

President Truman was the man faced with deciding whether to drop the atomic bomb on Japan. (Photo by Getty)

Of course it is easy to say that if I had been in Truman's shoes, I would not have ordered the two bombings. But it is possible to imagine greater restraint. The British and Americans had planned in detail the gas-bombing of a list of 17 major German cities, but in the end did not carry it out because the moral case seemed to depend on Germany using gas first. Restraint was possible, and, at the very end of the war, perhaps more politically acceptable.
Richard Overy is a professor of history at the University of Exeter and editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of World War Two (OUP, 2015)
"Yes. It was the least bad option" - Robert James Maddox

The atomic bombs were horrible, but I agree with US secretary of war Henry L Stimson that using them was the "least abhorrent choice". A bloody invasion and round-the-clock conventional bombing would have led to a far higher death toll and so the atomic weapons actually saved thousands of American and millions of Japanese lives. The bombs were the best means to bring about unconditional surrender, which is what the US leaders wanted. Only this would enable the Allies to occupy Japan and root out the institutions that led to war in the first place.

The experience with Germany after the First World War had persuaded them that a mere armistice would constitute a betrayal of future generations if an even larger war occurred 20 years down the line. It is true that the radiation effects of the atomic bomb provided a grisly dividend, which the US leaders did not anticipate. However, even if they had known, I don't think it would have changed their decision.
Robert James Maddox is author of Hiroshima in History: The Myths of Revisionism (University of Missouri Press, 2007)
Watch: Could the Nazis have built the first atomic bomb?

"No. Japan would have surrendered anyway" - Martin J Sherwin

I believe that it was a mistake and a tragedy that the atomic bombs were used. Those bombings had little to do with the Japanese decision to surrender. The evidence has become overwhelming that it was the entry of the Soviet Union on 8 August into the war against Japan that forced surrender but, understandably, this view is very difficult for Americans to accept.

Of the Japanese leaders, it was the military ones who held out against the civilian leaders who were closest to the emperor, and who wanted to surrender provided the emperor's safety would be guaranteed. The military's argument was that Japan could convince the Soviet Union to mediate on its behalf for better surrender terms than unconditional surrender and therefore should continue the war until that was achieved.

Once the USSR entered the war, the Japanese military not only had no arguments for continuation left, but it also feared the Soviet Union would occupy significant parts of northern Japan.

Truman could have simply waited for the Soviet Union to enter the war but he did not want the USSR to have a claim to participate in the occupation of Japan. Another option (which could have ended the war before August) was to clarify that the emperor would not be held accountable for the war under the policy of unconditional surrender. US secretary of war Stimson recommended this, but secretary of state James Byrnes, who was much closer to Truman, vetoed it.

By dropping the atomic bombs instead, the United States signalled to the world that it considered nuclear weapons to be legitimate weapons of war. Those bombings precipitated the nuclear arms race and they are the source of all nuclear proliferation.
Martin J Sherwin is co-author of American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J Robert Oppenheimer (Atlantic, 2008)
"Yes. It saved millions of lives in Japan and Asia" - Richard Frank

Dropping the bombs was morally preferable to any other choices available. One of the biggest problems we have is that we can talk about Dresden and the bombing of Hamburg and we all know what the context is: Nazi Germany and what Nazi Germany did. There's been a great amnesia in the west with respect to what sort of war Japan conducted across Asia-Pacific. Bear in mind that for every Japanese non-combatant who died during the war, 17 or 18 died across Asia-Pacific. Yet you very seldom find references to this and virtually nothing that vivifies it in the way that the suffering at Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been.

With the original invasion strategy negated by radio intelligence revealing the massive Japanese build-up on the planned Kyushu landing areas, Truman's alternative was a campaign of blockade and bombardment, which would have killed millions of Japanese, mostly non-combatants. For example, in 1946 the food situation would have become catastrophic and there would have been stupendous civilian deaths. It was only because Japan surrendered when it still had a serviceable administrative system - plus American food aid - that saved the country from famine.

Another thing to bear in mind is that while just over 200,000 people were killed in total by the atomic bombs, it is estimated that 300,000-500,000 Japanese people (many of whom were civilians) died or disappeared in Soviet captivity. Had the war continued, that number would have been much higher.

American and Filipino prisoners of war during the 1942 Bataan Death march on the Philippines. Some historians cite Japanese atrocities such as these when discussing the decision to drop the bomb. (Photo by Getty)

Critics talk about changing the demand for unconditional surrender, but the Japanese government had never put forth a set of terms on which they were prepared to end the war prior to Hiroshima. The inner cabinet ruling the country never devised such terms. When foreign minister Shigenori Togo was told that the best terms Japan could obtain were unconditional surrender with the exception of maintaining the imperial system, Togo flatly rejected them in the name of the cabinet.

The fact is that there was no historical record over the past 2,600 years of Japan ever surrendering, nor any examples of a Japanese unit surrendering during the war. This was where the great American fear lay.
Richard B Frank is a military historian whose books include Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire (Random House, 1999)
"No. Better options were discarded for political reasons" - Tsuyoshi Hasegawa

Once sympathetic to the argument that the atomic bomb was necessary, the more research I do, the more I am convinced it was one of the gravest war crimes the US has ever committed. I've been to Japan and discovered what happened on the ground in 1945 and it was really horrifying. The radiation has affected people who survived the blast for many years and still today thousands of people suffer the effects.

There were possible alternatives that might have ended the war. Truman could have invited Stalin to sign the Potsdam declaration [in which the USA, Britain and Nationalist China demanded Japanese surrender in July 1945]. The authors of the draft of the declaration believed that if the Soviets joined the war at this time it might lead to Japanese surrender but Truman consciously avoided that option, because he and some of his advisors were apprehensive about Soviet entry. I don't agree with revisionists who say Truman used the bomb to intimidate the Soviet Union but I believe he used it to force Japan to surrender before they were able to enter the war.

A young atomic bomb survivor cries as he receives a treatment at temporary hospital at Shin Kozen Elementary School in August 1945 in Nagasaki, Japan. (Photo by Yasuo Tomishige/The Asahi Shimbun via Getty Images)

The second option was to alter the demand for unconditional surrender. Some influential advisors within the Truman administration were in favour of allowing the Japanese to keep the emperor system to induce so-called moderates within the Japanese government to work for the termination of the war. However, Truman was mindful of American public opinion, which wanted unconditional surrender as revenge against Pearl Harbor and the Japanese atrocities.

Bearing in mind those atrocities, it's clear that Japan doesn't have a leg to stand on when it comes to immoral acts in the war. However, one atrocity does not make another one right. I believe this was the most righteous war the Americans have ever been involved in but you still can't justify using any means to win a just war.
Tsuyoshi Hasegawa is a professor of history at the University of California at Santa Barbara and the author of Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan (Harvard University, Press 2005)
"Yes. The moral failing was Japan's" - Michael Kort

Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb was the best choice available under the circumstances and was therefore morally justifiable. It was clear Japan was unwilling to surrender on terms even remotely acceptable to the US and its allies, and the country was preparing a defence far more formidable than the US had anticipated.

The choice was not, as is frequently argued, between using an atomic bomb against Hiroshima and invading Japan. No one on the Allied side could say with confidence what would bring about a Japanese surrender, as Japan's situation had been hopeless for a long time. It was hoped that the shock provided by the bombs would convince Tokyo to surrender, but how many would be needed was an open question. After Hiroshima, the Japanese government had three days to respond before Nagasaki but did not do so. Hirohito and some of his advisers knew Japan had to surrender but were not in a position to get the government to accept that conclusion. Key military members of the government argued that it was unlikely that the US could have a second bomb and, even if it did, public pressure would prevent its use. The bombing of Nagasaki demolished these arguments and led directly to the imperial conference that produced Japan's offer to surrender.

The absolutist moral arguments (such as not harming civilians) made against the atomic bombs would have precluded many other actions essential to victory taken by the Allies during the most destructive war in history. There is no doubt that had the bomb been available sooner, it would have been used against Germany. There was, to be sure, a moral failing in August 1945, but it was on the part of the Japanese government when it refused to surrender after its long war of conquest had been lost.
Michael Kort is professor of social science at Boston University and author of The Columbia Guide to Hiroshima and the Bomb (Columbia Press, 2007) This article was first published in the August 2015 issue of BBC History Magazine

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Was the US justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the Second World War?

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For years debate has raged over whether the US was right to drop two atomic bombs on Japan during the final weeks of the Second World War. The first bomb, dropped on the city of Hiroshima on 6 August 1945, resulted in a total death toll of around 140,000.

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Short list of reasons to drop

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President Truman’s decision to drop the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki has always been a highly debatable topic. According

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Short list of why not to drop

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Note: This section is intended as an objective overview of reasons against dropping the atomic bomb. For the other side of the issue, go here. Reasons Against Dropping the Atomic Bomb - Argument 1: The Bomb Was Made For Defense Only
The origins of the Manhattan Project go back to 1939, when Hungarian-born physicist Leo Szilard, who had moved to the U.S. in 1938 to conduct research at Columbia University, became convinced of the feasibility of using nuclear chain reactions to create new, powerful bombs. German scientists had just conducted a successful nuclear fission experiment, and based on those results, Szilard was able to demonstrate that uranium was capable of producing a nuclear chain reaction. Szilard noted that Germany had stopped the exportation of uranium from Czechoslovakian mines which they had taken over in 1938.

He feared that Germany was trying to build an atomic bomb, while the United States was sitting idle. Although WWII had not yet started, Germany was clearly a threat, and if the Germans had a monopoly on the atomic bomb, it could be deployed against anyone, including the United States, without warning. Szilard worked with Albert Einstein, whose celebrity gave him access to the president, to produce a letter informing Roosevelt of the situation. Their warning eventually resulted in the Manhattan Project. As far as reasons against dropping the atomic bomb, bomb opponents argue that the atomic bomb was built as a defensive weapon, not an offensive one. It was intended to be a deterrent, to make Germany or any other enemy think twice before using such a weapon against the United States. To bolster their argument, these critics point out that ever since WWII, the weapon has been used only as a deterrent.

From 1949-to 1991, the Cold War was waged under the shadow of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD), and even though the United States fought major wars in Korea (while Truman was still in office), Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, nuclear weapons were never again deployed. In other words, not using them in those wars has been an admission that they should never have been used offensively in the first place.
Reasons Against Dropping the Atomic Bomb - Argument 2: Use of the Bomb was Illegal

"Reasons Against Dropping The Atomic Bomb"
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Another one of the reasons against dropping the atomic bomb was the League of Nations. On September 39, 1938, the League of Nations, "under the recognized principles of international law," issued a unanimous resolution outlawing the intentional bombing of civilian populations, with special emphasis against bombing military objectives from the air. The League warned, "Any attack on legitimate military objectives must be carried out in such a way that civilian populations in the neighborhood are not bombed through negligence." Significantly, the resolution also reaffirmed that "the use of chemical or bacterial methods in the conduct of war is contrary to international law." In other words, a special category of illegal weapons had been recognized, a category today called Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD).

However, bomb supporters point out that since the United States was not a member of the League of Nations; its laws did not apply. And anyway, the League had been disbanded in 1939, long before the atomic bomb was used. Additionally, the law did not specifically outlaw nuclear weapons. To that counter-argument, bomb opponents reply that since America presents itself to the world as a model for human rights, the U.S. should aspire to at least meet the basic code of conduct agreed to by the rest of the civilized world. They also point out that nuclear weapons were not specifically outlawed because they did not exist, but as a weapon of mass destruction, they most certainly would have been.
Reasons Against Dropping the Atomic Bomb - Argument 3: Use of the Atomic Bombs Was Racially Motivated
Opponents of President Truman's decision to use the atomic bomb argue that racism played an important role in the decision; that had the bomb been ready in time it never would have been used against Germany. All of America's enemies were stereotyped and caricatured in home front propaganda, but there was a clear difference in the nature of that propaganda. Although there were crude references to Germans as "krauts," and Italians as "Tonies" or "spaghettis," the vast majority of ridicule was directed at their political leadership. Hitler, Nazis, and Italy's Mussolini were routinely caricatured, but the German and Italian people weren't.

By contrast, anti-Japanese racism in American society targeted the Japanese as a race of people and demonstrated a level of hatred comparable with Nazi anti-Jewish propaganda. The Japanese were universally caricatured as having huge buck teeth, massive fangs dripping with saliva, and monstrous thick glasses through which they leered with squinty eyes. They were further dehumanized as being snakes, cockroaches, and rats, and their entire culture was mocked, including language, customs, and religious beliefs. Anti-Japanese imagery was everywhere-in Bugs Bunny cartoons, popular music, postcards, children's toys, magazine advertisements, and in a wide array of novelty items ranging from ashtrays to "Jap Hunting License" buttons. Even Tarzan, in one of the last novels written by his creator Edgar Rice Burroughs, spent time in the Pacific hunting and killing Japs. Numerous songs advocated killing all Japanese. The popular novelty hit, "Remember Pearl Harbor" by Carson Robison, for example, urges Americans to "wipe the Jap from the map." It continues:

Remember how we used to call them our "little brown brothers?"
What a laugh that turned out to be
Well, we can all thank God that we're not related
To that yellow scum of the sea
They talked of peace, and of friendship
We found out just what all that talk was worth
All right, they've asked for it, and now they're going to get it
We'll blow every one of them right off of the face of the Earth

Americans didn't like Mussolini, Hitler, and Nazis, but many hated the Japanese race. The official magazine of the US Marine Corps, The Leatherneck, in May 1945 called the Japanese a "pestilence," and called for "a giant task of extermination." The American historian Steven Ambrose, a child during the war, has said that because of the propaganda, he grew up thinking that the only good Jap was a dead Jap. That hatred began with Pearl Harbor and increased when news broke of the Bataan Death March, and with each act of defiance against America's "island-hopping" campaign. Killing became too easy, and the dehumanizing of the enemy commonplace. Some American soldiers in the Pacific sent home to their girlfriends the skulls of Japanese soldiers, to be displayed on their desks at work. American soldiers did not send home Nazi skulls as trophies or sweetheart gifts. In 1944 a US Congressman presented President Roosevelt with a letter-opener purportedly made from the arm bone of a Japanese soldier.

American racism led to a failure to distinguish between the Japanese government, dominated by hard-line militarists, and the Japanese civilian who was caught up in their government's war. Racists viewed all Japanese as threats not because of their political education, but because of their genetics. As further evidence, bomb opponents point to US policy toward the Japanese-Americans living in California at the time. They were rounded up, denied their basic liberties under the Constitution (even though many of them were American citizens), and sent to isolated camps in the deserts, surrounded by barbed wire, until the war's end.

Nothing on this scale was done to the Germans during WWII, or even during the First World War, when there were millions of German and Austrian immigrants and their children living in the United States. In May 1944 Life magazine reported on the hardships of George Yamamoto, a Japanese-American who had immigrated to the US in 1920 at the age of 17 to work on his family's farm. In 1942 Mr. Yamamoto worked at a fish market, ran a sporting goods store, and was a solid member of his community, along with his wife and children.

They were interned, but Mr. Yamamoto applied for a relocation program, was cleared by the US government as loyal and trustworthy, and was packed off to Delaware to find work. He was run out of town before he could even start, and was relocated to New Jersey, where he was to work on a farm owned by Eddie Kowalick. But the citizens of New Jersey were no more accommodating. They feared an influx of Jap workers and didn't want their kids sitting next to "yellow" children in school. A petition to evict Yamamoto was circulated, there were multiple threats of violence against him, and one of Mr. Kowalick's barns was burned to the ground. After threats were made against the life of Mr. Kowalick's baby, he felt he had no choice but to ask Mr. Yamamoto to move on. Three weeks after Life printed this story, they printed letters written in response. Most of those selected by the editorial staff for publication were supportive of Mr. Yamamoto and expressed embarrassment at the ignorance of some Americans. But the magazine also published this letter, written by William M. Hinds of Birmingham, Alabama:
Sirs, there are many of us who believe that the deceit, treachery, and bestiality inherent in the Japanese we are fighting in the Pacific are traits not automatically removed from members of the race merely by accident of birth in the US. There are many of us who believe, quite sincerely and simply, that Japanese immigrants to the US and their American-born children will deliberately live an impeccable American life while awaiting an opportunity to perpetrate a Pearl Harbor of their own dimensions. Cheers for the public-spirited citizens of New Jersey who ran Mr. Yamamoto away.
While it's easy to see that extreme racism toward the Japanese existed, it's much more difficult to assess the role racism may have played in President Truman's decision. However, there are a few instances in the historical record where the President does refer to the Japanese in questionable terms. In his July 25, 1945 diary entry, as Truman is writing about the bomb, he refers to the "Japs" as "savages, ruthless, merciless and fanatic." On August 11, after both Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been devastated, an American clergyman named Samuel McCrea Cavert wrote the President urging him to give the Japanese time to surrender before using any more atomic bombs. Truman replied, "When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast." Whether these comments are racist about the Japanese people or only express the President's opinion about the Japanese military is a matter of interpretation.
Reasons Against Dropping the Atomic Bomb - Argument 4: There Were Alternatives
Supporters of President Truman's decision to use atomic weapons against Japan tend to paint the decision as a difficult choice between two stark options-it was either American boys or the bomb. Opponents of the bomb are adamant that there were other options available to the President, which at the very least should have been tried before resorting to the bomb.

Alternative 1: A Demonstration of the bomb

One alternative might have been to arrange a demonstration of the bomb. Although the U.S. and Japan had no diplomatic relations after Pearl Harbor, a demonstration might have been arranged discretely through some back channel, perhaps through the Russians. It was already known in Washington that the Japanese had reached out to the Russians earlier to try to arrange some form of mediation with the U.S. After the war, the United States did conduct numerous atomic bomb tests on small volcanic atolls in the Pacific. Such a site could have been prepared in 1945. If representatives of the Japanese government, military, and scientific community could have seen the bomb, it might have been enough to convince them of the foolishness of continued resistance. If not, at least the U.S. could say that they had tried, thereby maintaining the moral high ground.

Bomb supporters make several counter-points. Although the test in the New Mexican desert had been successful, the technology was still new. What if the demonstration bomb didn't work? The United States would have looked weak and foolish. A failed demonstration might even serve to increase Japanese resolve. Additionally, the U.S. only had two bombs left after Los Alamos. If the demonstration failed to convince the Japanese to surrender, only one bomb would remain. Others would presumably be produced later, but there was no guarantee of that. One bomb, as it turned out, was not enough to force surrender.

A third counter-point is that a demonstration would eliminate the element of surprise, and the Japanese might use American POWs as human shields. The four cities on the target list had not been bombed with conventional weapons so that they might serve as accurate test subjects for the destructive powers of the atomic bomb. The Japanese would surely deduce American strategy and might move Americans to those target cities. Finally, bomb supporters counter-argue that it was the opinion of Robert Oppenheimer and other scientists on the Interim Committee that a demonstration wouldn't convince the Japanese to surrender. "We can propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war," they wrote. "We see no acceptable alternative to direct military use."

Alternative 2: Wait For the Russians
Military analysts working for the Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) in 1945 believed that two things must happen for the Japanese leadership to surrender. There had to be acceptance of the inevitability of defeat; and a clarification from the Americans that "unconditional surrender" did not mean national annihilation. The JIC believed as early as April 11, 1945, that a Soviet declaration of war on Japan would satisfy the first necessity:
By the autumn of 1945, we believe that the vast majority of Japanese will realize the inevitability of absolute defeat regardless of whether the U.S.S.R. has actually entered the war against Japan. If at any time the U.S.S.R. should enter the war, all Japanese will realize that absolute defeat is inevitable.
A Strategy and Policy Group within the War Department arrived at the same conclusion in June, and their work was discussed between General Marshall and Secretary Stimson. The Americans also knew what the Japanese were thinking on this subject. Having long-broken the Japanese diplomatic code, the United States eavesdropped on conversations between the Japanese Foreign Minister in Tokyo, and the Japanese ambassador to the Soviet Union in Moscow. In a cable sent on June 4, the Foreign Minister wrote:
It is a matter of utmost urgency that we should not only prevent Russia from entering the war but should also induce her to adopt a favorable attitude toward Japan. I would therefore like you to miss no favorable opportunity to talk to the Soviet leaders.
The ambassador cabled back that there wasn't much reason to hope, and that he had received reports of substantial Soviet troop and supply movements heading the east. He continued:
If Russia by some chance should suddenly decide to take advantage of our weakness and intervene against us with the force of arms, we would be in a completely hopeless situation. It is clear as day that the Imperial Army in Manchukuo would be completely unable to oppose the Red Army which has just won a great victory and is superior to us on all points.
The Japanese had reason to fear. In the Second World War, the United States and the Soviet Union put aside their ideological differences to form an alliance against Nazi Germany. It was an uneasy alliance; Joseph Stalin believed that the Americans and British had purposely delayed opening a second front in Europe (D-Day-June 6, 1944) so that the Russians would bear the brunt of defeating the Nazis. Nevertheless, in a secret meeting between President Roosevelt and Stalin at Yalta, the Soviet leader had promised that three months after the end of the European campaign he would declare war on Japan and move against Japanese forces in China.

In July, when President Truman traveled to Germany to meet his Allied leaders for the first time, pinning down Stalin on the exact date was at the top of his agenda. When Truman and Stalin met on the 17th, the Soviet leader confirmed they would declare war on Japan on August 15. Later that night, Truman wrote in the diary, "Most of the big points are settled. He'll be in the Jap War on August 15th. Fini Japs when that comes about" (meaning, they'll be finished). Some bomb supporters point out that according to post-war interviews of Japanese leaders, none of the high-ranking officials were of a mind that a Soviet attack alone would have convinced them to surrender. However, this is irrelevant if Truman believed it would, and if intelligence information at the time suggested it would.

To summarize, by July 17 the American military, the President, and at least some Japanese all were of a mind that Soviet intervention in the war would prove decisive. And, a date for this intervention had been set. Bomb opponents thus question why the United States used atomic bombs on August 6 and 9, when they knew the Russians were coming a week later, and when Operation Torch wasn't scheduled for months. Why not wait? Opponents believe they know the answer to that question, discussed below as argument #5.

Alternative 3: Let the Japanese Keep Their Emperor
The third and perhaps most important alternative to both the bomb and the land invasion was to modify the demand for unconditional surrender and allow the Japanese to keep their emperor. Of course, he would have to be demoted to a powerless figurehead (much like the Royal Family in Great Britain), but it was possible that this one condition alone might have been enough to satisfy the American War Department's conclusion that it was necessary to convince the Japanese that they would not be "annihilated" if they surrendered. The American government clearly understood that if they harmed the emperor, whom the Japanese revered as a god, the Japanese would resist forever. And the key to this argument lies in the fact that the American government already planned on letting the emperor stay. All they had to do was find a way to hint at their intentions loud enough for the Japanese to hear. On June 13, in a memorandum to President Truman from Acting Secretary of State Joseph Grew (former American ambassador to Japan), Grew wrote:
Every evidence, without exception, that we are able to obtain of the views of the Japanese with regard to the institution of the throne, indicates that the non-molestation of the person of the present emperor and the preservation of the institution of the throne comprises irreducible Japanese terms...They are prepared for prolonged resistance if it be the intention of the United Nations to try the present emperor as a war criminal or to abolish the imperial institution...Failure on our part to clarify our intentions in this regard..will ensure prolongation of the war and cost a large number of human lives.
Secretary of War Stimson also argued that American intentions regarding the emperor should be made clearer. General Marshall referred to this as "giving definition to unconditional surrender" (ultimately resulting in the Potsdam Declaration). On the Interim Committee, he was joined in this point by Undersecretary of the Navy Ralph A. Bard. In a June 27 memo to Stimson, Bard wrote:
During recent weeks I have also had the feeling very definitely that the Japanese government may be searching for some opportunity which they could use as a medium of surrender. Following the three-power conference emissaries from this country could contact representatives from Japan somewhere on the China Coast and make representations with regard to Russia's position and at the same time give them some information regarding the proposed use of atomic power, together with whatever assurances the President might care to make with regard to the Emperor of Japan and the treatment of the Japanese nation following unconditional surrender. It seems quite possible to me that this presents the opportunity which the Japanese are looking for.
But by the time Stimson pushed on this issue, the President was very much under the influence of former Senator James Byrnes, who had become Truman's personal advisor and was soon to be named the new Secretary of State. Byrnes argued that the President would be crucified politically by the Republicans for "making a deal" with the Japanese. Byrnes won the argument and eliminated crucial language in the Potsdam Declaration about the Emperor, Truman gave a less-than-convincing excuse that Congress didn't seem interested in modifying unconditional surrender, and the Japanese were left in the dark with regards to American intentions toward the emperor.

Although there was certainly no guarantee that taking this action would bring about a Japanese surrender, bomb opponents argue that it was at least worth a try (although bomb supporters counter-argue that doing so could have been interpreted as a weakness by the Japanese military leadership and could actually have emboldened the Japanese to fight on). Instead, the Japanese ignored the Potsdam Declaration, the atomic bombs were dropped, the Japanese surrendered, and the Americans, as planned, allowed the emperor to stay on the throne (where he remained until his death in 1989). This is the one area where Secretary of War Stimson had regrets. His biographer later wrote, "Only on the question of the Emperor did Stimson take, in 1945, a conciliatory view; only on this question did he later believe that history might find that the United States, by its delay in stating its position, had prolonged the war." Seems like a pretty fair point among the reasons against dropping the atomic bomb.

Alternative 4: Continue Conventional Bombing
Some military analysts were convinced in the summer of 1945 that Japan very near surrendered, that the pounding they were taking from conventional weapons would soon convince the Japanese cabinet that further resistance was futile. That position was bolstered when, after the war, Secretary of War Stimson commissioned aboard to perform a detailed investigation into the effectiveness of Allied bombings during the war. They subsequently interrogated 700 Japanese military, government, and industry officials, and they recovered and translated documents related to the war effort. Their report, the Strategic Bombing Survey, makes the obvious observation that Japan might have surrendered earlier if they had had a different government. That was seen as one of the better reasons against dropping the atomic bomb. But it goes on to express a more startling opinion:
Nevertheless, it seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion...Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.
Bomb supporters are extremely critical of this alternative. Specifically, they charge that information counter to the Survey's conclusion was left out of the report, and that inter-service wrangling resulted in the Air Force over exaggerating its role in the war so as to secure a large post-war budget. They also point out that even if the Survey's evidence and conclusions were accurate, it is illogical to criticize the Truman administration for not pursuing an alternative to the bomb that was based on information obtained only after the war was over.

The President had to make his choice based on information known to him at the time. More importantly, bomb supporters are critical of this alternative because despite the overwhelming naval and air superiority enjoyed by US forces at the end of the summer of 1945; those forces were still suffering significant losses. Kamikazes were still attacking American vessels. The USS Indianapolis, after delivering the Hiroshima bomb materials to Tinian island in the Marianas, was sunk on July 30. Of 1,196 crewmen aboard, approximately 300 went down with the ship. Of the remaining 900 men who went into the water, only 317 survivors were picked up when the wreckage was discovered four days later. The rest died from exposure, dehydration, and shark attacks. It was the single greatest loss of life in the entire history of the US Navy. Meanwhile, Allied casualties were still averaging about 7,000 per week. As war veteran and writer Paul Fussell later pointed out, "Two weeks more means 14,000 more killed and wounded, three weeks more, 21,000. Those weeks mean the world if you're one of those thousands or related to one of them." And Allied losses continued even after the atomic bombings. Between August 9 and the actual surrender on the 15th, eight American POWs were executed via beheadings, the US submarine Bonefish was sunk with the loss of its entire crew, and the destroyer Callagan and the USS Underhill were lost.

Reasons Against Dropping the Atomic Bomb - Argument #5: Use of the bomb was more to scare Russia than to defeat Japan.

As discussed above, bomb opponents question why the United States used atomic bombs on August 6 and 9, when they knew the Russians were going to declare war on Japan a week later, and when Operation Torch wasn't scheduled for months. Why not wait? Bomb opponents believe that the American government did not wait for the Russians because they were already thinking about the post-war world and how they could best limit Soviet gains when they redrew the map of Europe. They believed the shock-and-awe effect of using the atomic bomb against Japan would make the Soviet Union more manageable in post-war negotiations. (This argument had been made most consistently by historian Gar Alperovitz). There was certainly reason to be concerned about the Soviet Union. When Germany collapsed, the Russians had made huge advances. Russian troops moved into Hungary and Rumania and showed no inclination to leave there or the Balkans. But was it an acceptable trade-off to annihilate several hundred thousand civilians just so the Russians wouldn't be able to get in on the kill of Japan, and so the U.S. might have the upper hand in the post-war world? Bomb opponents are abhorred by the moral implications.

In the spring of 1945, as Germany surrendered, some of the scientists who had developed the new weapon as a Nazi deterrent started to have reservations about their invention. One was Leo Szilard, who had written the letter along with Einstein back in 1939 that had convinced Roosevelt to start the Manhattan Project. In April 1945 Einstein wrote a letter of introduction for Szilard, who was able to get a meeting with Mrs. Roosevelt on May 8. But then the President died. When Szilard tried to get a meeting with Truman, he was intercepted by James Byrnes, who received him in his South Carolina home. Szilard's biggest concern was that the Soviet Union should be informed about the bomb ahead of time. He was afraid that the shock of America using the bomb on Japan would NOT make the Soviets more manageable, but would instead spur them to develop their own atomic bomb as quickly as possible, possibly igniting an arms race that could eventually lead to a nuclear war. But Szilard was talking to exactly the wrong person.

Byrnes told Szilard, "Russia might be more manageable if impressed by American military might, and that a demonstration of the bomb [on Japan] might impress Russia." Years later, Szilard wrote of the encounter, "I shared Byrnes' concerns about Russia's throwing her weight around in the post-war period, but I was completely flabbergasted by the assumption that rattling the bomb might make Russia more manageable." He later mused, "How much better off the world might be had I been born in America and become influential in American politics, and had Byrnes been born in Hungary and studied physics."

Having met with Szilard, Byrnes was even more firmly convinced of the rightness of his own views. At the Interim Committee meetings, he cut off any debate about warning the Soviets, and Secretary of War Stimson gave in. When Stimson briefed Truman on June 6, he informed the President that the Interim Committee recommended he not tell their Soviet ally about the bomb, "Until the first bomb had been successfully laid on Japan." But Stimson wasn't sure how they should handle the meeting with Stalin at Potsdam. Truman replied that he had purposefully delayed the meeting for as long as possible to give the Manhattan scientists more time. Having been counseled by Byrnes, Truman was already thinking about how to handle the Russians.

According to historian Gar Alperovitz in the 1985 edition of his work, Atomic Diplomacy, when Truman was on his way to Potsdam, he was overheard by a White House Aide to have said during a discussion about the test bomb and what it meant to America's relationship with the Soviet Union, "If it explodes, as I think it will, I'll certainly have a hammer on those boys." For decades now bomb opponents have cited this story as evidence of Truman's true intentions. However, a close look at the sources raises questions about Alperovitz's methods. That story was first told by the White House Aide himself, Jonathan Daniels, in a book published in 1950. Daniels says he had heard the story second-hand and he stated specifically that Truman had been referring to Japan. He only speculated that the President might also have had the Russians in mind.

While at Potsdam, Truman received a coded message confirming the success of the test bomb. According to Winston Churchill, it completely changed Truman's demeanor toward Stalin; made him more confident and bossy. Just before leaving Potsdam, Truman did feel obliged to say something to the Soviet leader. He writes in his diary, "I casually mentioned to Stalin that we had a new weapon of unusual destructive force." But Truman did not say it was an atomic bomb. On his way back from Potsdam,Truman gave the order to use the new weapon (even though they had not yet issued the Potsdam Declaration).

But Leo Szilard wasn't quite finished yet. Having been dismissed by Byrnes, he wrote a petition to the President of the United States, in which he warned that unless handled properly, the bomb might ignite an arms race that could result in "devastation on an unimaginable scale." Dated July 17, the petition was co-signed by 69 Manhattan Project scientists. President Truman did not see the petition until after the atomic bombs had been dropped. It was intercepted and held back by General Leslie Groves, military head of the Manhattan Project and a key advisor to James Byrnes.

Reasons Against Dropping the Atomic Bomb - Argument #6: Truman Was Unprepared for Presidential Responsibility

Another criticism directed toward President Truman is that he simply wasn't ready for the responsibility of being president; he didn't understand the ramifications of his decisions, he delegated too much authority, and he was unduly influenced by James Byrnes. This has been looked at as one of the chief reasons against dropping the atomic bomb

Byrnes has been discussed in detail above, but a summary of the key moments where his influence was most critical is appropriate. He intercepted Leo Szilard and made sure the President never heard his views. He dominated the Interim Committee as Truman's personal representative, where he stifled debate and pushed successfully for a recommendation to the President that the bomb be dropped without warning either the Russians or the Japanese. Additionally, Truman allowed Byrnes to erase crucial language in the Potsdam Declaration. The original draft specifically mentioned the bomb, and American intentions to allow the emperor to stay. The result was a final draft that threatened only vague "utter destruction," and might have been interpreted as a threat to the emperor. Without the specific language regarding the emperor, the Japanese were left with the promise that justice would be meted out to all war criminals. Critics argue that Truman, who stood so small in FDR's shoes, was too inexperienced to form his own opinions, and too weak to resist Byrne's dominance.

The second criticism of Truman is that he did not keep enough personal control over this terrifying new weapon. The military order to use the bomb, delivered before the Potsdam Declaration had been issued, is an open-ended order in which the Air Force had too much control. The aircraft group that included the Enola Gay was directed to deliver the first atomic bomb, weather-permitting, on any of the four target cities: Hiroshima, Kokura, Niigata, or Nagasaki, on or after August 3. The order goes on to say, "Additional bombs will be delivered on the above targets as soon as made ready by the project staff. Further instructions will be issued concerning targets other than those listed above." In other words, the Air Force had instructions to bomb any or all of these four cities whenever atomic bombs were ready. If a dozen atomic bombs had been ready instead of only two, no further permission would have been required to use them. In fact, it took an order from President Truman to stop any further bombing after Nagasaki had been hit.

At the very least, critics argue, Truman should have required permission to use the second bomb. Originally, the second target was not scheduled to be attacked until six days after Hiroshima. But with bad weather in the forecast, and with the Russians suddenly declaring war on Japan after the Hiroshima bomb, General Groves moved up the date to make sure that the plutonium bomb was "field-tested" before the war could end (Hiroshima had been hit with a Uranium bomb). Some critics have pointed out that three days was simply not enough time for the Japanese to even confirm what had happened in Hiroshima, which appeared to them to have simply blinked off the map. Although the Japanese leadership suspected the bombing was atomic in nature, they sent scientists to Hiroshima to confirm these suspicions and they had not even returned with their findings when Nagasaki was hit. There are some critics who support dropping the first bomb, but feel the second was completely unnecessary. Either way, critics of the dropping of "Fat Man" on Nagasaki blame Truman for a lack of leadership. So, the arguments can be split in that way and one could support the first dropping, but not the second. This was also among the more common reasons against dropping the atomic bomb.

Some critics question whether or not Truman really understood the weapon and the human consequence of his decision to use it. A lack of understanding also was among the decent reasons against dropping the atomic bomb. On July 25, Truman describes in his diary some of the details he had just received about the test bomb in Los Alamos. He then writes, "I have told the Sec. of War, Mr. Stimson, to use it so that military objectives and soldiers and sailors are the target and not women and children." On the 9th, the day Nagasaki was bombed, President Truman addressed the nation on radio. He said, "The world will note that the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base. That was because we wished in this first attack to avoid, insofar as possible, the killing of civilians." Considering the nature of the weapon, the Interim Committee's recommendation to use the bomb against "workers' dwellings", and that the center of the city was the aiming point for the bomb, these claims are jaw-dropping.

Either President Truman really did not understand the bomb, or he was covering his "posterity". Either way, critics argue, it does not reflect well on the President. If the former is true, evidence suggests Hiroshima and Nagasaki quickly educated the president. On August 10, having received reports and photographs of the effects of the Hiroshima bomb, Truman ordered a halt to further atomic bombings. That night, Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace recorded in his diary, "Truman said he had given orders to stop the atomic bombing. He said the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn't like the idea of killing, as he said, 'all those kids'."
Reasons Against Dropping the Atomic Bomb - Argument 7: The Atomic Bomb Was Inhumane
The logical conclusion to the list of arguments against the bomb is that use of such a weapon was simply inhumane. Hundreds of thousands of civilians with no democratic rights to oppose their militarist government, including women and children, were vaporized, turned into charred blobs of carbon, horrifically burned, buried in rubble, speared by flying debris, and saturated with radiation. Entire families, whole neighborhoods were simply wiped out. The survivors faced radiation sickness, starvation, and crippling mutilations. Then there were the "hidden cracks," the spiritual, emotional, and psychological damage. Japanese outside of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, scared and ignorant about radiation sickness, treated bomb victims as if they had a communicable disease. They were shunned and ostracized from Japanese society. Some blamed themselves for various reasons-like a woman who convinced her parents to move to Hiroshima before the bomb was dropped, or those who were the only survivor of a family, or of an entire school. Others, unable to cope with trauma left untreated, committed suicide. Radiation continued to haunt the survivors, bringing a lifetime of sickness, not the least of which was an increase in the rates of various cancers.

Birth defects for those pregnant at the time jumped significantly, and although the data on birth defects passed down through generations is inconclusive (Hiroshima and Nagasaki are ongoing laboratories of the long-term effects of radiation exposure), bomb survivors and their offspring continue to suffer anxiety about the possibilities. It is impossible to do justice to this argument in a simple summary. A few specific first-hand accounts could be repeated here, but they would be insufficient. To truly grasp the magnitude of the suffering caused by the use of atomic weaponry on human beings, one has to be immersed in the personal. The cold statistics must give way to the human story. For some Americans, that process began with the publication of John Hersey's Hiroshima in 1946, and it continues today through such autobiographical accounts as Keiji Nakazawa's epic manga series Barefoot Gen (all ten volumes of which were recently published in English by Last Gasp Press), and through stunning documentaries like HBO's White Light, Black Rain(2007).

In 1945, not many Americans seemed to be thinking things through. Those cold statistics and that war-time hatred made using the bomb easy to rationalize. Leo Szilard was one of those few when he worried that using it without any warning would hurt America's moral standing in the world. In the years that followed, some Americans who were intimately involved with the atomic bombs did start to think things through. Admiral Leahy, President Roosevelt's Chief of Staff, wrote in his memoir:
It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender... My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make wars in that fashion, and that wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.
Even some of those who participated in the mission had regrets. Captain Robert A. Lewis, the co-pilot on the Enola Gay's mission over Hiroshima, wrote in his log as the bomb exploded, "My God, what have we done?" In 1955 he participated in an episode of the television show This is Your Life that featured a Hiroshima survivor. Lewis donated money on behalf of his employer for operations to help remove the scar tissue of young Japanese women horribly disfigured by the bomb ten years earlier.

America supposedly places a high value on life. To a significant portion of the country, protecting a fertilized human egg is so important; they are willing to base their vote on this one issue alone. And humaneness extends to the animal world as well. People go to prison for being cruel to their pets. In a society that places so much value on life, how can the immense death and suffering of non-combatants caused by the atomic bombs be justified? Opponents of President Truman's decision to use those weapons argue simply that it cannot.

So, there you have it. A compendium and anthology on all of the reasons against dropping the atomic bomb.
Sources Used and Recommended This article is part of our larger educational resource on World War Two. For a comprehensive list of World War 2 facts, including the primary actors in the war, causes, a comprehensive timeline, and bibliography, click here.
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Reasons Against Dropping the Atomic Bomb - History

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Critics argument many reasons against dropping the atomic bomb, pointing to international law, the impending surrender of Japan, and other reasons

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This month marks the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And with each passing year the historical record is ever clearer that dropping the A-bombs was unnecessary, repugnant and very likely a war crime.

The bombings probably killed more than 200,000 Japanese civilians and maimed untold more. Such destruction of life stirs me to sorrow and outrage. That's even more true given that there was an alternative available: the US could have dropped an A-bomb in or near Tokyo Bay. Such a warning shot could have persuaded the Japanese to end the war, and its humane nature would have enhanced the US's moral standing.

The atomic bombings are often framed as the only alternative to a land invasion of a Japan that wouldn't surrender under any but the most-dire circumstances. The possible need for an invasion loomed throughout 1945, and Americans naturally feared many US casualties. Much of a fanatic Japanese soldiery-and possibly many citizens-might fight to the last inch. One early study estimated 40,000 American soldiers' deaths, yet President Harry Truman and others soon spoke of "half a million."

But the A-bombs' advent automatically changed that, allowing the US to wield the threat of nuclear attack. With the first device tested and proven in July 1945, and numerous others being readied early in August, America could have used their power as a new dimension of threat-rather than crudely dropping the bombs as mass killers.

Properly used as threats to ensure quick surrender, the A-bombs could have prevented virtually all further deaths in Japan-of Americans, Japanese and any others, from invasion, firebombing, A-bombing and ground warfare. That is, of course, precisely what the A-bombs did achieve. But the US hastily destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki first.

Tokyo Bay would have been the ideal place to display the bombs' power. A large open area, the bay is next to Tokyo and all of Japan's leaders, including the emperor. It offered a wide array of places-on vacant land or on water-to drop an A-bomb, for fully awesome effect. The mushroom-cloud explosion could be near or not-so-near to Tokyo, and more or less dangerous to Japan's emperor, leaders, citizens and urban capital.

In this way, the US could have carefully maximized the scope of the threat, while minimizing the harm to Tokyo itself. And if the Japanese were crazily intransigent, we could have simply dropped another A-bomb, closer to Tokyo or in a low-population area. Even another, if needed.

But American leaders had acquired the habit of bombing cities, having attacked Berlin, Hamburg and even the cultural jewel of Dresden. US Air Force leaders such as Jimmy Doolittle gained instant fame from bombing raids over Japan. The hellish firebombing of Tokyo in March 1945 killed some 250,000 civilians and maimed huge numbers more.

With the Japanese A-bombings, a key player was Leslie Groves, who had built up and managed the Manhattan Project over the years. He now chaired the committee guiding Truman's actions, and he closely managed-daily and hourly-the planning, loading, and crew work to fly the bomb for dropping. Grove was determined to deploy them fast. Separately, a supposed threat of the Soviet Union's invading Japan was cited as a reason for haste. Such an excuse to rush to bomb can likely be chalked up, at least partly, to self-interest by the US.

And the planning of Truman's advisors-including Groves, Doolittle, and Curtis LeMay-was full of mistakes. Hiroshima emerged as a candidate after having escaped attack thus far in the conflict. It was almost entirely civilian, and any attention to its few military targets soon disappeared. Hiroshima was distant from Tokyo, and the blast itself wiped out all communication, so the Japanese leadership in Tokyo didn't fully see the destruction. When the leveling of Hiroshima predictably gave Tokyo little awareness, Nagasaki was added. But that choice was even less logical, and it doubled the death toll and the stifling stain on America's moral character.

The US had already exceeded rational and civilized bounds with our massive bombings in Europe and Japan. Our job was to conclude the war with a minimum of mega-deaths. By using the Tokyo Bay method to display the A-bombs' power, America would have shown its compassion and humanity. But Truman and his people failed, and the harm was widespread and lasting.

On top of the Japanese deaths and casualties, the actual dropping of the A-bombs likely heightened the stakes at the advent of the Cold War. Had the US not dropped the A-bombs, the nuclear arms race might have proceeded more slowly and less wastefully, possibly without hydrogen bombs. The US and USSR might even have cultivated cooperation and prosperity, in place of mutual fears and military-industrial excesses.

This 70th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is a sorrowful reminder: a final spasm of killing engulfed those two poor cities. Had the US instead fired a warning shot by dropping an A-bomb in Tokyo Bay, scarcely a soul would have died. And yet the leaders of that era chose to kill hundreds of thousands, instead.
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It's clear the US should not have bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki

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This month marks the 70th anniversary of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And with each passing year the historical record is ever clearer that dropping the A-bombs was unnecessary, repugnant and very likely a war crime. The bombings probably killed more than 200,000 Japanese civilians and maimed untold more.

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President Truman decides to use atomic bombs

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President Truman decides to use atomic bombs

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Reasons President Truman decided to use atomic bombs to end WWII.

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Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb | Harry S. Truman

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Easy read for and against dropping the bomb

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Sixty years ago today, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima.

It devastated four square miles of the city's center. Tens of thousands of people died instantly and tens of thousands perished later from effects of the blast.

Three days later, on Aug. 9, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, causing similar destruction.

Should the United Stated have dropped atomic bombs on these cities?

Dropping the atomic bombs arguably brought a swift end to the war, saving the lives of thousands of Americans. There are also sentiments that the Japanese brought this upon themselves with the surprise attack in 1941 on American forces at Pearl Harbor.

Japan agreed to an unconditional surrender on Aug. 14, 1945 - and this was a nation where many leaders refused to even consider surrender. The kamikaze suicide attacks illustrated this mentality.

The atomic bombs may have taken many lives, but they may have saved many others.

Plans for the invasion of the Japanese mainland, which would have been the next step in forcing Japan to surrender, estimated potential American casualties in the tens of thousands - and perhaps as many as a million.

And the casualties on the Japanese side would have been just as great, if not greater.

Japan's military was largely broken by August 1945 and the atomic bombings were unnecessary and barbaric attacks.

Some historians have suggested the United States could have achieved the same goal - a quick end to the war - had the bombs been demonstrated on a deserted island or purely military target.

Between the two bombings, nearly 200,000 people are believed to have died - almost all were civilians.

Japan was close to surrendering well before the atomic bombs.

As early as mid-April 1945, the U.S. had intercepted and decoded messages that indicated Japan was seeking to surrender on favorable terms.

Some historians have argued that Japan would have surrendered earlier if the U.S. had been clearer about allowing Japan's emperor to retain the throne, something that the eventual surrender allowed.

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Debatable: Should the United States have dropped atomic bombs on Japan?

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Sixty years ago today, the United States dropped an atomic bomb on the city of Hiroshima. It devastated four square miles of the city's center. Tens of thousands of people died instantly and tens of thousands perished later from effects of the blast. Three days later, on Aug.

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The Decision to Drop the Bomb [ushistory.org]

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Debate concerning Truman’s decision to use the atomic bomb on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August, 1945, continues to this date.

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Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki Facts for Kids

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Learn Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki facts for kids

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easy read

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HISTORY CRUNCH - History Articles, Biographies, Infographics, Resources and More

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Many historians have argued that the atomic bombing of Japan at the end of World War II was not necessary and unjustified. There have been several key reasons developed to support this position, such as:

It was inhumane.

It caused too much destruction.

It killed too many innocent people, including children.

It was unnecessary as Japan was essentially defeated.

Japan was seeking surrender.

It was not universally supported in the United States.

The United States could have done something else.

The United States should have waited longer between the two bombs.

It was used more to scare the Soviet Union than to defeat Japan.

It led to the modern atomic age and the threat of nuclear warfare.

Further to the idea that the bombs were inhumane because of the injuries they caused, others have suggested that the United States was unjustified in using the two atomic bombs to end World War II because they caused excessive destruction of both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On August 6th, 1945, the American B-29 plane, Enola Gay, dropped the atomic bomb Little Boy on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The bombing instantly killed 70,000 to 80,000 Japanese in the city and tens of thousands more due to radiation exposure. Three days later on August 9th, the United States dropped another atomic bomb, named the Fat Man, on the city of Nagasaki. The bombing of Nagasaki would kill another 40,000 people. The atomic bombs on Japan were the single deadliest weapons in all of human history and remains so still today. Beyond killing many people the atomic bombs also caused massive destruction in both cities. For instance, the atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945 ended in the destruction of 90% of the city. The initial blast and the resulting fires ravaged the city. It was made worse by the fact that many of the buildings in the city were constructed out of wood and paper. Crew members of the Enola Gay commented after about seeing much of the city on fire as they flew away from the city. Some historians have argued that this widespread destruction of the cities was immoral and therefore the United States was not justified in its use of the atomic bombs. In addition to the destruction of the city, some historians have argued that the two atomic bombs should not have been used because they caused the deaths of largely innocent civilians who lived in the two cities. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were not military targets and as such, many innocent children and women were killed from the powerful blast of the bombs. Some people have suggested that the United States should not have used the atomic bombs for this reason and should have instead carried out smaller bombing raids which could more easily target specific military targets.

The next main reason for why the atomic bombing of Japan by the United States was unnecessary and unjustified is that some historians now suggest that Japan was nearly defeated and seeking a way to surrender. This argument holds that since Japan was on the verge of defeat, they could have been forced to give up formally through different means. For example, when the war in the Pacific Theater began in 1941, with Japan's surprise attack of Pearl Harbor, Japan was at its height of power and controlled large sections of the south Pacific Ocean. However, by the summer of 1945 the United States had successfully pushed back the Japanese with its strategy known as ' island-hopping '. This strategy saw the United States forces leapfrog Japanese held island in the South Pacific in order to more quickly advance to Japan's main home islands. As such, by August of 1945, Japan was essentially limited to its main home islands and no longer had the ability to fight back in a meaningful way. Therefore, some historians have argued that the United States did not have to use the two atomic bombs to force Japan to formally surrender. In fact, some people have suggested that Japan was seeking a way to surrender while making sure Emperor Hirohito would not be removed or harmed.

This idea was strengthened by the fact that not all members of the American military or leadership supported the atomic bombing of Japan. For example, Dwight Eisenhower, who was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe during World War II and later became the 32nd President of the United States, famously disagreed with the use of the bombs. The following statement highlights his feelings on the atomic bombing of Japan. "In 1945, Secretary of War Stimson visited my headquarters in Germany, [and] informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act.... During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and second because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives. It was my belief that Japan was, at that very moment, seeking some way to surrender with a minimum loss of 'face.' The Secretary was deeply perturbed by my attitude, almost angrily refuting the reasons I gave for my quick conclusions." This statement shows that not all of the military leadership in the United States supported the use of the two atomic bombs in World War II. As such, some historians have used this to show that the United States was unjustified for using the bombs against Japan because it did not have complete support at the time.

Based on the previous two points (Japan was already nearly defeated and the use of the bombs was not totally supported) historians who disagree with the use of the atomic bombs have argued that the United States could have forced Japan to surrender by using several different strategies. First, some have suggested that the United States could have carried out a naval blockade of the island nation and forced the Japanese leadership into surrendering. The blockade would have prevented any resources from entering the country and would have forced Japan into a situation where they did not have enough resources to survive. Therefore, this would have forced them to surrender before they reached a crisis point. Second, some historians have proposed the idea that the United States could have used the atomic bombs in a different way that didn't directly harm innocent civilians. For example, it has been argued that the United States could have dropped an atomic bomb in an unpopulated area of Japan or in the harbor of a major city as a way of demonstrating the power of the technology without causing mass deaths. Others have suggested that the United States could have sent the Japanese leaders video footage of the atomic tests carried out during the Manhattan Project, such as the Trinity Test. Some have suggested this may not have been effective, but many contend that the Japanese leaders may have surrendered if shown the destruction of the weapon first.

Another argument against the use of the atomic bombs as the end of World War II was that it was immoral for the United States to use two atomic bombs against Japan so quickly together. For example, while some people agree that an atomic bomb may have been necessary to end the war, many argue that two atomic bombs went too far especially considering the time period. The first atomic bomb was used against Japan on August 6th, 1945 on the city of Hiroshima. The United States dropped the second atomic bomb just three days later on August 9th on the city of Nagasaki. Some historians have argued that this was not a long enough period between the two bombings for the Japanese leaders to truly consider surrender. Considering the technology of the time period, the Japanese leaders in Tokyo may not have believed that Hiroshima was truly devastated and may have needed more time to learn of the destruction. Some people have argued that the United states did not wait long enough before using the second bomb and was unjustified.

The next argument against the use of the atomic bombs was that the United States only used it as a way of scaring the Soviet Union. During World War II, the Allied nations of Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union faced off against the Axis nations of Nazi Germany, Italy and Japan. As the European Theater of the war came to an end, the main Allied nations famously met in a series of conferences (Yalta and Potsdam) to decide how to best handle the end of the war and the defeat of Germany. It is at these conferences that a divide or conflict began to emerge between the Soviet Union and the United States. For example, the Potsdam Conference is now viewed as a major event in the Cold War, because it highlighted the divide between Stalin and the other two leaders (Winston Churchill of Britain and Harry S. Truman of the United States). Neither side trusted the other and Joseph Stalin was resentful of the other two believing that they delayed the Normandy Invasion and Allied invasion of Italy during World War II to cause the Soviet army to struggle alone against Nazi Germany. It was at the Potsdam Conference that Truman made Stalin aware of the American atomic weapons program ( Manhattan Project) and that the Americans had developed the world's first atomic bomb. As well, Truman was incredibly suspicious of Stalin and his intentions and Stalin felt a similar way towards Truman. In general terms, the seeds of the Cold War were planted at the Potsdam Conference. The United States bombed Hiroshima just days after the conference ended and World War II was over in the just a few weeks, while the Cold War was just beginning. Today, many historians view the bombing of Japan at the end of World War II as a way of the United States signalling to the Soviet Union their capabilities. Since a divide was occurring between the two nations, some argue that the United States used the bombing of Japan as a means of warning the Soviet Union against carrying out any sort of conflict. Therefore, some people criticize the use of the atomic bombs by the United States because they killed thousands of Japanese people as a way of scaring the Soviet Union. This strategy, if true, shows that the United States did not need to use the atomic bombs to end the war and was therefore unjustified.

The final argument that people use as evidence against the use of the atomic bombs in World War II, is that they led to the nuclear arms race in the years that followed. At the outset of the Cold War, the United States was the only nation in the world to contain atomic weapons, such as those used against Japan in 1945. As such, the Soviet Union was not able to militaristically challenge the United States and worked to develop their own atomic weapons. However, on August 29th, 1949, the Soviet Union performed a test of their first atomic bomb codenamed 'First Lighting'. Throughout the rest of the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union each stockpiled thousands of nuclear weapons. As well, each superpower challenged the other for supremacy and developed more powerful weapons. By the 1950's each country had developed enough nuclear weapons to destroy the other. This development was an important aspect of the Cold War, as the stockpiles of nuclear weapons acted as a means of defense. Essentially, each nation was deterred from going to war with other, or from escalation tensions, due to the fear of a nuclear war. Historians refer to this idea as Mutual Assured Destruction (M.A.D.) since any escalation to war could result in the total destruction of both countries. Therefore, some people argue that with the atomic bombing of Japan, the United States caused the nuclear arms race among different nations around the world. This has arguably made the world a more dangerous place since some very unstable nations contain nuclear weapons. As such, some historians criticize the United States for using the atomic bombs in 1945.

In conclusion, historians have identified several main reasons against the use of the atomic bombs, but it remains an extremely controversial topic and one of the most debated in all of history. For instance, many continue to argue that the atomic bombing of Japan was completely necessary and that the United States was justified for using the terrifying weapons against an enemy nation that refused to surrender in the face of defeat.

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reasons against the atomic bombing of japan

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reasons against the atomic bombing of japan

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reasons against the atomic bombing of japan

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reasons against the atomic bombing of japan

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reasons against the atomic bombing of japan

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Reasons Against the Atomic Bombing of Japan

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Reasons Against the Atomic Bombing of Japan - The atomic bombing of Japan at the end of World War II by the United States is one of the most debated and controversial topics in all of history. Since the bombing in 1945, historians have debated whether or

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Atomic bombing of Japan was not necessary to end WWII. US gov’t documents admit it - Geopolitical Economy Report

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US government documents admit atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not necessary to end WWII. Japan was on verge of surrendering. Nuclear attack targeted Soviet Union, starting Cold War

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The Pros and Cons of Bombing Hiroshima and Nagasaki

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PROS CONS Pro #1: The bombs ended WWII The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was a very critical part of ending World War II. Since Japan was way too powerful to tackle head-on, we needed to find a way to defeat them quickly and easily. The atomic bomb solved that problem, so to