I want to write more – as well as do more reading – but right now this comment I’ve left at Roy Berman’s post on “Hiroshima bombing anniversary” is my most recent statement on the significance of the two atomic blasts on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. More and more, I view both as unnecessary war crimes.

Continuing what M-Bone said, I think it’s important to view the A-Bomb not as only a military weapon, but as a means to a diplomatic strategy the US implemented to frustrate the Japanese.

I’m looking again for the declassified documents, but Wikipedia has useful information about how the Allies, the USSR, and Japan acted diplomatically at the end of the war. Japan had always wanted a negotiated settlement, and knew it could not defeat the US. In that sense, both the USSR and the US used Japan’s strategy against it. Both knew Tokyo could not hold out, and the A-Bomb gave both the means to force Japan to accept unconditional surrender and for both to get more than Tokyo would have given without its deployment. The US and the USSR knew Japanese behavior because of the Russo-Japanese War, which is almost a dress rehearsal for WW2 in every way. In that sense the A-Bomb is not the humanitarian salvation it is portrayed as; it’s the ultimate last-minute ploy.

And, given how the Japanese managed to undermine and remove almost every stipulation of the surrender, like liberalization and giving up the Imperial Office, when the North Koreans invaded the ROK in 1950, the deaths of those sacrificed for the ploy were unnecessary. For me, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki are monuments to human hubris about the limitations of human rationality, concerning ignorance of the future and contempt for precedent and probabilistic, pragmatic consideration. I’d say Presidents Roosevelt and Truman and Premier Stalin have blood on their hands.

Filed under: East Asia, History, Military, Russia, USA, WMD Tagged: atomic bombs, fdr, Harry s truman, hiroshima, japan, jospeh stalin, nagasaki, russo-japanese war, unconditional surrrender