Film about ‘father of the atomic bomb’ finally opens in Japan after being delayed by outrage at ‘Barbenheimer’ memes
Archived version: https://archive.ph/8vjF7
but it was always ever going to end the way it did, if not a lot worse.
This takeaway is mythologization of America’s most reprehensible act.
We murdered 210,000 civilians because of a perceived threat to capitalism.
Every Purple Heart that has been given out since WW2 all come from a surplus we made in preparation for a land invasion of Japan. Think about that. Had the bombs not worked, our own estimates put the casualties at hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Just US soldiers. Not even counting Japanese soldiers or civilian lives. I don’t think the Soviets would have had a magical method to invade without similar casualties.
Were the bombs the right move? I don’t know. It was almost 80 years ago in a complicated time that none of us discussing it now can fully understand. I think it’s telling that Japan surrendered shortly after. I also think it’s telling that no nuclear weapon has been used in combat since then. But based solely on our estimates of what a land invasion, either by the US or the Soviets, would cost in terms of lives lost, I do think it’s a fair argument to say the bombs wound up costing less.
I don’t think the Soviets would have had a magical method to invade without similar casualties.
The USSR could invade Japan from the less populated and lightly defended north and northwest, while the US would have to invade from the heavily populated and well-defended south and east. This might have helped, but of course we can’t say anything for sure.
While I’m not defending the use of the bombs as bargaining chips, Japan would have suffered the same fate as Germany under Soviet rule. North Japan and South Japan, alongside a Tokyo Wall, would have not been just a “threat to capitalism”.
So it’s better to melt the faces off of hundreds of thousands of innocent people than to risk a two state solution?
They weren’t innocent, they were willing and eager subjects of a fascist state that had killed over 20 million Chinese, Koreans, and Filipinos amongst others, and there was never a chance of it being two state solution.
If there’s a reason Truman dropped the bomb as an “anti-communist” measure it was to just to irredeemably prove we had them and it wasn’t propaganda.
In the real world, however, Imperial Japan was an irrational state that was trying to force a conditional surrender in a war the leaders never thought they could win in the first place.
The USA waited three days between Hiroshima and Nagasaki for a surrender. It didn’t happen. That alone proves there wasn’t one coming from other circumstances.