This is an interpretation of what happened. It’s the one that paints America in the most favourable light, for sure.
Another one is that the “no surrender” mentality was a direct result of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration which demanded “unconditional surrender” from Japan. Japan knew they had lost, they were just hoping to fight for the SPECIFIC surrender condition of the preservation of the Imperial line (aka, let the Emporer still be the Emporer, preserve the family).
Had the Potsdam Declaration permitted that concession, it very well may have been the case that no nukes would have been necessary.
Anyways: tough to understand the exact truth of any hypothetical situation. I just think it’s unfortunate that the “The USA HAD to, though” argument is so often repeated without a very full context of the surrounding political realities. It’s a very bite sized explanation, and it paints the USA in a fantastic light. It’s perhaps not a coincidence that it was AT Potsdam that the west hinted to Stalin of the existence of the nuclear bomb.
What’s the point of building the thing if you can’t prove to the world you have it, and are willing to use it?
Another one is that the “no surrender” mentality was a direct result of the terms of the Potsdam Declaration which demanded “unconditional surrender” from Japan. Japan knew they had lost, they were just hoping to fight for the SPECIFIC surrender condition of the preservation of the Imperial line (aka, let the Emporer still be the Emporer, preserve the family).
It should be pointed out that this is what ended up happening anyway. The emperor stayed in power and lived until like the 90s. So whoopsie daisy on the whole nuke thing
You are leaving out the historical context of hyper violent insane independent action for honor mindset of the soldiers within the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy (IJA/IJN).
This culture of insubordination included a widespread belief that they did not to have obey civilian commands, and is largely responsible for ground level soldiers deciding on their own to kick off the war in Manchuria.
It’s entirely reasonable to envision a counterfactual version where either one of, or both the IJA and IJN refuse to surrender, or even just large contingents within either.
I’m not saying this to invalidate anything you’ve said, but I do think it’s highly relevant context when considering any alternative ways that could have gone.
Well no, the best hand you could have played would have been to drop them on military targets instead of civilian targets.
Those bombs were war crimes too; we don’t need to invoke some kind of American exceptionalism for a war crime that happened 80 years ago.
Internment camps are also war crime AFAIK. So it seems like the situation is just that the US government did not believe Japanese people were human and decided to do war crimes and human rights violations.
Yes, I agree. WWII had a bunch of war crimes in it. I would rather we learned from them than we tried to justify them.
McNamara says of the firebombing of Japan that LeMay knew it was a war crime.
