Until now I forgot that people saw theaters as social venues, would eat buckets of popcorn, go the toilet etc.
From that lens, viewers fully focused and digesting every second of the movie was definitely not the average target.
Marking it on attention span makes it sound like convoluted and rambling sentences were universally good in the first place. I'd argue the contrary for a magazine or news outlet.
A surprising number of the people of Hiroshima remained more or less indifferent about the ethics of using the bomb.
While people far from Japan made much of the uniqueness and power of a single bomb destroying a single city for those on the ground it was just another single city destroyed overnight by bombing .. the 73rd such city destroyed in a relatively short duration of time.
The destruction and death in Hiroshima was on par with the destruction and death in Tokyo when that was firebombed.
Was the dropping of the bombs any worse than the fire bombings that had been taking places for months? LeMay didn't seem to think so.
But I still struggle to understand the Japanese mentality. Were they OK with the prospect of city after city being atom- or fire-bombed, so long as no ground invasion occurred?
He was a war criminal, but not the leader of the war by any means. That was reserved for the militarists - Tojo and Suzuki and others.
That's definitely enough when you are a living god. From the point he gave his approval, he was the only one that could fully stop it.
You're right that he was a puppet for the military, exactly because of that god position he was born into.
Depending on how you look at it (and reams of paper have been expended on this topic), he was somewhere between a puppet and a symbol. Certainly not innocent, but also not the instigator.
The historical record is very clear, as is Hirohito's own statement at the time:
"Furthermore, the enemy has begun to employ a new and cruel bomb, causing immense and indiscriminate destruction, the extent of which is beyond all estimation. Should we continue to fight, not only would it result in the ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but it would also lead to the total extinction of human civilization.
How, then, are We to protect the millions of Our subjects and atone before the spirits of my Imperial ancestors?
This is why We have ordered the Empire to accept the terms of the Joint Declaration. "
I really strongly recommend Ian Toll's histories of the Pacific war, because there is information that is not in the early histories (at least the ones I read a while back) that is because things in the US and former USSR are more declassified. In particular, the US had a pretty good understanding of what is going on in the Japanese government. They knew a lot of civilian leaders wanted to surrender before Hiroshima, but were afraid they would be associated by a coup, as had happened in the 1930s. That's also what the Japanese leaders who wanted to surrender were worried about as well.
The sad thing is that there is a non-zero chance they where right. There was considerable concern about that from the war leadership at this point. The allies _dramatically_ underestimated the forces that the Japanese had marshalled at the two invasion sites, and it would have been not very good. The alternative that the Navy was pushing was a starvation blockade of Japan. This probably would have been succesful but led to millions more lives lost in Japan, and a almost inevitable civil war in Japan.
They did not underestimate the Japanese forces.
They did an assessment in early 1945 and did calculations and the needed invasion force. But the Japanese could read a map just as well as the Americans, and could guess where Olympic would happen and redeployed, which the Americans detected:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall#Ground_thre...
For survivors of a city destroyed overnight, with a great many friends and relatives dead, others injured or suffering the follow on results of malnutrition, disease, etc. there's little to separate the ethics of the use of an atomic weapon from the ethics of the use of tonnes of HE and incendiary weapons.
The most famous comparison, Tokyo Vs Hiroshima, has little to distinguish them from the PoV of a survivor.
https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/09/22/tokyo-hiroshima/
Again, for context, 72 Japanese cities, including Tokyo, were each leveled in single bombing raids before Hiroshima.
The question should be less about the ethics of spending an ungodly amount of money to destroy a city with a single bomb, and more about the ethics of destroying a single city for considerably less cost multiple times over.
I very much suspect a great many regular people in Japan were very much not okay with seeing their fellow citizens destroyed in a war being pursued by other elements of Japanese society.
Agree about the necessity of the never again stuff though, even though we've been failing at that continuously.
The Japanese did things that were arguably even more horrific than the bomb; read up on unit 731 and the rape of Nanjing. I'm sure those who experienced those things would have far preferred dying in a flash.
The German did the holocaust, Babi Yar, etc.
The Allies did various fire-bombings.
The current singular taboo around nuclear weapons kind of misses how destructive and horrific the whole war was. This was total war on a scale that is hard to imagine today. To be fair modern nuclear weapons pack a punch that far exceed those atoms bombs.
Vannevar Bush, more than any single individual, scientist or non-scientist, stands at the center of the bureaucratic decision to feasibility-test the fission chain reaction.
(compsci & s/w engineers can love VB all they want for As We May Think, but the man had some serious and arguably unnecessary blood in the short term, and decades of existential fear in the long term, on his hands. The silence of his legacy has been far too effective at ducking popular criticism of his role in history)
If humanity ever chooses to avoid creating yet-to-be-developed doomsday devices in humanity's future, while _still_ harvesting benefits of new R&D (viz. nuclear power plant energy), it needs to 'debug' the social epistemology around the Advisory Committee on Uranium / Uranium Committee (leading to S-1 under the NDRC).
edit: added 'in the short term, and decades of existential fear in the long term'
What about a pure Soviet entry into the war? You have to look at what happened to Poland and Eastern Europe when the Soviet army invaded. Once again, by any metric, this was the best possible outcome at the time.
But it was unquestionably a local maximum - the best solution at the time, with horrific consequences afterward.
While the debate on the bomb is not and never will be settled, I'm not sure I'd call the bloodshed caused by Hiroshima and Nagasaki to be unnecessary: it ended up a war that had caused so far millions of death.
And what social epistemology, actually?
Indeed it would have been better for me to focus on the decades of existential fear rather than the immediate bloodshed because, as demonstrated, the debate descended straight to the usual about the morality of dropping the bomb in WWII.
>And what social epistemology, actually?
Karl Compton and Leo Szilard whispering in Vannevar Bush's ear about the threat that the prospective threat that a German atomic bomb would pose. Vannevar made the case that the physicists would do these feasibility tests anyways with or without his support, but this is a (somewhat biased) counterfactual and therefore incapable of being evaluated.
The whole episode demonstrates that it is by responding affirmatively to the 'choice to learn' - in this case whether a unique embodiment of already known physical properties is _really_ feasible - which finds us crossing the technological Rubicon of runaway doomsday device development.
Vannevar would go on to defend his actions in saying that it was good that such a horrific capacity was demonstrated in such a 'spectacular' way. His words in his autobiography, "Pieces of the Action" strive to cement the legacy of his gift to the world:
"The advent of the A-bomb is generally regarded as a catastrophe for civilization. I am not convinced that it was. With the pace of science in this present century it was inevitable that means of mass destruction should appear. Since the concept of one world under law is far in the future, it was also inevitable that great states should face one another thus armed. If there were no A-bombs the confrontation would still have occurred, and the means might well have been to spread among a a people a disease for a chemical that would kill or render impotent the whole population. History may well conclude, if history is written a century from now, that it was well that the inevitable confrontation came in a spectacular way that all could recognize, rather than in a subtle form which might tempt aggression through ignorance. At least we all know, we and the rest of the world, that there are A-bombs and what they can do."https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DwKPFT-RioU
There's also the argument that it saved more lives than the deaths it caused. The same can not be said for Japan's atrocities.
Lower than the Holodomor? Lower than Dresden or Tokyo fire bombings? Lower than the Holocaust? Lower than Unit 731?
Linked there is also a related article from 1985
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1985/07/15/hiroshima-the-...
TO OUR READER: The New Yorker this week devotes its entire editorial space to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb, and what happened to the people of that city. It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use.
The Editors
Truman famously called Oppenheimer a "cry baby" when Oppenheimer expressed doubt. Truman had spent the past decade dealing with the war in his capacity as senator and vice president - seeing the effects it was having first (or second) hand.
Now, this isn't to say that America was right or not right to drop one or both bombs. It may "feel" like I'm saying "the Japanese deserved it for their behavior" - that's not a belief I hold, either.
I just want to provide color for why American leadership seemed so relatively unconcerned with the lives of Japanese civilians in 1945.
I think whatever we learned (I have read that Japan was already ready to surrender). after should be applied to future wars but not be applied to situations where the information was not available.
If anybody is responsible for Japanese suffering it’s clearly Hirohito and his generals who were too cowardly to accept defeat and instead chose to have killed hundreds of thousands of Japanese while they were hesitating.
They were concerned about Japanese lives. They were more concerned about American lives, but they concluded the shorter the war was the more lives of everyone involved could be saved.
The Japanese food situation was also very dire: there was a very real risk of famine during Winter 1945-46, and so if the war could be ended before that many millions of Japanese civilians could be saved.
Some contemporaries of note didn't think it was justified either [1]. Eisenhower, a decorated war hero who later cautioned against the over-expansion of the military industrial complex in his Presidential farewell speech, said of the bombing in his memoir:
> I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. [...] I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced [...] my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly, 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
I vacationed in Japan a few months ago via a tour group and we went to Hiroshima. It was one of the most emotionally-taxing experiences of my life. The bomb was literally dropped on a hospital [2]. The heat of the explosion melted the tops of headstones in a nearby graveyard and seared some poor soul's shadow into the nearby steps that they were sitting on. Hundreds of thousands of civilians' lives were erased or permanently altered in a matter of seconds. Grabbing a sandwich from the 7-11 next door and eating it while I stared at where it all happened 80 years prior definitely fucked with me a bit.
I've never experienced war or lost somebody I care about to an enemy combatant. All things considered I've led a rather easy life. I can't say how I'd feel otherwise, but the me that exists right now thinks that our military shouldn't have done what it did. That they haven't done it again makes me wonder whether they realize this too.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombing...
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51089656-140-days-to-hir...
* https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/140-...
It documents, using Japanese source material including interviews with the principals involved, the decision making process leading up to the eventual surrender.
What was most surprising to me was the reluctance of many members to surrender even after two bombs were dropped. The Emperor himself had to be called in multiple times (which was unprecedented) to ensure that the surrender was 'pushed' through. Even after the vote to surrender happened there were still machinations to overturn it: a reminder that there was a coup attempt to prevent the surrender from being broadcast:
pseudolus•2d ago