Atomic Japan

Interesting. I hate it when my history channel lies... Besides, it seems that they didn't need Uranium for the second bomb. They had bombed it with Plutonium.

The bomb was, I believe, necessary for a number of reasons both military and otherwise.  The first is the most commonly used, but I will say it again: the bombing convinced the High command to end the war.  In order to end the war, the Japanese Cabinet would have to vote for surrender unanimously.  A simple majority would have been unlikely with this cabinet, as it was comprised mostly of militarists.  They believed that by drawing out the war, they could dictate more favorable terms.  Essentially, they had decided to make it as hard as possible for the US in the hope that they would just give up and go home.  Many countries had successfully fought wars which essentially consisted of waiting until the other guy got fed up with fighting.  It worked for us Americans during our revolution.  They had no reason to surrender yet.  That was logical prior to the bombs: with conventional munitions, you can�t really do all that much damage.  Think about it, it wasn�t the bombing campaigns that brought down Germany, despite events like Dresden, it was the soldiers marching into their cities.  The bombs convinced even the militarists that the US didn�t need to fight a war on their terms, that the US could simply bombard Japan into rubble without fighting a war that they could drag into an elongated struggle. 

Secondly, the bomb allowed a clean end to the war.  The American occupation had no resistance to contend with because, as I said above, the Japanese people, and the Japanese high command had no incentive to resist.  There was not an insurgency in post war Japan.  This allowed the humanitarian projects (such as the massive distribution of food that Macarthur ordered) to go off relatively easily.  That food distribution saved millions of lives.  This also allowed the new Japanese constitution to be brought out into daylight.  The original plan for the revised Japanese constitution was exactly that, a slightly revised version of the Meiji constitution, which as we know had led to a militarized constitutional monarchy.  Macarthur saw this plan and literally threw it out.  He had his staff write a new one, and this constitution was among the most liberal ever set in place for a nation state.  Remember that whole flap about the equal rights amendment here in the US a while ago?  That was written into the original Japanese constitution.  This constitution, the one that has resulted in a democratic and prosperous Japan was really only implementable at the end of a gun, and the only gun that could possibly be big enough to force a national bureaucracy to change was nuclear. 

Thirdly, the speedy end of the war saved hundreds of thousands of lives.  Even those who believe that the A-bombs were unnecessary say only that Japan would have surrendered by November or December.  At the rate that civilians were dying on the mainland and in concentration camps (200,000 a month (check wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Atomic_bombings_of_Hiroshima_and_Nagasaki)) the Japanese would have killed at least 600,000 more people.  That is more than died in the bombings.  This estimate also includes the assumption that the US would have continued bombing Japan.  This would have undoubtedly included Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the only difference being thousands of incendiary weapons as opposed to one nuclear one. 

Fourthly, the dropping of A-Bombs on Japan ended the era of total war.  The era had begun back during the American civil war, when Grant, Sherman, and Sheridan laid waste to vast swaths of the south.  It had continued up through WWII with the massive bombings of civilians in order to stop their war machines.  After the pictures of what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki got out, there was no longer any public support for bombing civilians.  Before that, there had been loads of it.  Look at what happened with the bombings in Vietnam.  There was an uproar.  Look at today, whenever there is a bombing raid in Iraq, we hear about how many civilians were killed.  During WWII, those numbers would have been newsworthy only with a couple of zeros added to the end, and they would not have been mourned.  It is my firm belief that without the bombings of Japan, without the horrors that they allowed the world to see, the concept of simply laying waste to entire cities would be far more commonplace today. 

In conclusion, I think that the bombings saved American and Japanese lives then, due to the fact that there wasn�t an invasion, saved even more lives by ending the killing by the Japanese Army on the mainland and in the POW cages, and then saved lives later, by ending an era of unrestricted war on civilians.  It took an act that was morally wrong to a vast and public degree to show the wrongness of many lesser degrees.

Wow, I kinda wrote a lot.  Sorry for making all of you read my unedited ramblings. 

I am going by a documentary I saw called "Secret Axis Aircraft of WW2" or some similar title which included the German batplane or stealth bomber and I recall clearly that the plan was to have a virtual air armada of thousands of these planes on the Island of Japan to deflect an invasion.

I would say that although that may have been their plan, unless they had massive underground production facilities that have not been found in the 60 years since the war ended, the plan would have fallen through. 

I don't really see how this is a strong argument to drop the bomb since the Japanese had been offering conditional surrenders months and months. Yes from the point of view of billionaire American and European bankers and industrialists that was a great reason to drop the bomb because it meant total control and recolonization of pacific SE asia without a chance of Japan getting a  piece of the pie.  But saving lives? Come on please!

Civilians on the mainland under Japanese control were dying at a rate of 200,000 per month.  That means that unless the Japanese would have offered unconditional surrender within one to two months of the time that the bomb was dropped anyway the bomb's net impact was positive. 

Do you think that a conditional surrender would have done that?  The Japanese wouldn�t have given up anything for quite some time while conducting negotiations, and eventually, would have ended up with a significant portion of the land that they conquered anyway.  The killing of civilians wouldn�t end as a result of a conditional surrender. 

I don't believe the primary reason the U.S. entered the war was to "save lives" at all.

Neither do I and if you recall, I never said that.  I know that war kills people, and unless FDR was tripping on some kind of superdrug, he knew that too. 

It was just for expansion of power and preventing Japan from becoming the new Asian superpower. If you look at history you see that the Japanese kicked out the french and british and became the new colonizers in SE Asia, also they built up manchuria as one of their favorite economic colonies as well. I speculate this is why the U.S. sent the flying tigers to China to provoke and pressure the Japanese. The U.S. wanted to prevent Japan from becomming the top dog in Asia.

That is true.  The US had a vested interest in seeing Japan not become the dominant power in Asia because then they would be a threat to us.  They did become the dominant power for several years, and they most certainly were a threat. 

It had nothing to do with saving lives and everything to do with sacrificing lives in exchange for power and wealth. Thats what most wars of expansion are about.

I would argue that the Japanese were the ones fighting an expansionist war.  The Americans were at that time trying to get out of the Philippines . They were training an army there when the Japanese attacked.  In the end, after WWII and after giving the Philippines their independence (less than a year after the war was over), America had significantly less land than it started out with.  America fought the war for its own interests, but I believe that those interests coincided with what was morally right: stopping the killing by the brutal Japanese forces. 

Pearl Harbor was just a domestic catalyst.
I would agree with that as well, although without an attack, it is unlikely that FDR could have gotten the populace behind a war.

The undeniable fact that the nukes saved american lives by stopping american deaths right after their use distorts the whole 5 year picture. Its not false that they saved american lives at the expense of Japanese civilians but its an exagerration to say that their use was necessary and that their use was only to save lives. They were used to show off power and dominance to an extent too. The saving lives part was more of an excuse and less of a reason than is conventionally recounted I believe.

Firstly, the bombs didn�t just save American lives, they saved the lives of civilians on the mainland of Asia in Korea and China as well.  Secondly, if I said that the primary purpose of the Atomic bombs was to save lives, I misrepresented myself.  The primary purpose was to force the surrender of a belligerent power through total war.  The fact that they saved lives is secondary.  To paraphrase a lawyer in some movie I saw once: the intentions of the US in dropping the bomb are not on trial here.  The question that was asked was whether or not they were necessary.  It is a question that requires we look back and exercise our hindsight.  I will maintain that they were necessary because they saved lives.  I don�t care what Truman�s intentions were.  He could have done it because he liked the sight of the mushroom clouds, and until someone convinces me that Japan was about to surrender, I will believe that the bombs had a net positive impact in terms of casualties and were necessary.