US government documents admit that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not necessary to end WWII. Japan was on the verge of surrendering. The nu...

‘US government documents admit that the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not necessary to end WWII. Japan was on the verge of surrendering. The nuclear attack was the first strike in Washington’s Cold War on the Soviet Union. Ben Norton reviews the historical record.’

  • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
    38·
    1 year ago

    Your description of the conditions is correct but your conclusion is a non-sequitur. It does not follow logically that the only or best option to stop those atrocities was to mass murder civilians. Despite what the propaganda about the bombings that has since been inculcated into the western public claims, they were not in fact necessary for compelling Japan’s surrender. There were already internal disputes about this in the Japanese leadership for some time, but after their decisive defeat in Manchuria at the hands of the Red Army the decision to surrender as soon as possible became pretty much unanimous. Every day that went by was another day that the Soviets took more territory and came closer and closer - through the Kurils - to the Japanese home islands. The Japanese imperialists knew just as well as the Nazis that they stood a much better chance of avoiding punishment for their crimes (and some of them even being allowed to retain some power in the post war state) if they surrendered to the US rather than the USSR. Moreover we now know that the US leaders knew this. Their primary motivations were to have a live weapons test and to intimidate the Soviet Union.

    • AOCapitulator [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
      17·
      1 year ago

      Their primary motivations were to have a live weapons test and to intimidate the Soviet Union

      and to deny the USSR their due in treaty by claiming that they didn’t help defeat Japan/ preventing them from doing another gosh darn destroying Nazi Germany and hogging more credit

    • Dolores [love/loves]@hexbear.netEnglish
      13·
      1 year ago

      you probably know this but for the sake of clarity, the atomic bombs were dropped on August 6th, and a few days later on the 9th. Soviets invaded on the 7th. their plans for Hokkaido were for the 24th, and cancelled by the surrender.

      post war assessments make clear that soviets’ comprehensive destruction of the Kwantung army was perceived by parts of the japanese and us governments as sufficient on its own to force the surrender, but your comment sort of reads like the americans dropped the bombs after the soviet’s success to force the japanese to surrender to them instead, which is chronologically unsound.

    • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
      214·
      1 year ago

      You say there were ‘options,’ yet somehow managed to avoid actually naming them.

      What would you tell the Koreans/Chinese/Burmese whose families died while the negotiations stretched out?

      • DamarcusArt@lemmygrad.ml
        28·
        1 year ago

        And what of the Japanese civilians? Are their lives automatically forfeit because they had the gall to be born in the bad guy country?

        Do not justify atrocities with other atrocities. And do not ignore the bulk of another person’s argument to pretend they had no argument. You just look like an idiot when you do that.

        • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
          219·
          1 year ago

          What of the Japanese civilians?

          You haven’t given me one word about why their lives were more valuable than the enslaved peoples.

          • CascadeOfLight [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
            28·
            1 year ago

            Well this is some inverted reasoning. The bombs didn’t end the war quicker and the US military didn’t think that they would. It was pointless cruelty to civilians that saved no one, for the sake of intimidating the USSR.

            And if we follow this logic, then every (white) inhabitant of the US deserves to have every single atom of their bodies blasted out into interstellar space at the speed of light for their country’s past and present crimes.

      • AmarkuntheGatherer@lemmygrad.ml
        18·
        1 year ago

        Not much since there’d be quite few of them. Japan would be on the retreat at that point and would have very limited capacity to carry out further atrocities.

        What would you tell people that lost their families in the Korean war to support the atomic bombs, since Japan surrendering to the US instead of the USSR all but guaranteed that war?

        • Dagwood222@lemm.ee
          113·
          1 year ago

          “A limited capacity.” Or, they might have decided that if they were going to lose, they would take as many people as they could with them.

          Read up on biological warfare Unit 731 and tell me that there was no chance they’d have killed as many people as they could.

          https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

          • AmarkuntheGatherer@lemmygrad.ml
            16·
            1 year ago

            Fascists are often cowards, I’m not saying they wouldn;t callously kill people during their retreat, rather that atrocities take planning and coordination, ergo time, time they wouldn’t have if they wanted to flee and they would have,

            If your logic held up there’d be little stopping them from committing these light-speed atrocoties between the second bomb and the surrender.

            • JucheBot1988@lemmygrad.ml
              6·
              1 year ago

              Plus, if they really wanted to go out in a blaze-of-glory Goetterdaemmerung situation, why would the atomic bombs have made any difference whatsoever? The argument seems to be “the Japanese government wanted to kill Japanese civilians, and the only way we Americans could stop them was by… killing Japanese civilians.”

          • culpritus [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
            11·
            1 year ago

            https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731#Surrender_and_immunity

            Destruction of evidence

            As the Second World War started to come to an end, all prisoners within the compound were killed to conceal evidence, and there were no documented survivors.[102] With the coming of the Red Army in August 1945, the unit had to abandon their work in haste.

            Curious.

            American grant of immunity

            Interesting.

            Among the individuals in Japan after its 1945 surrender was Lieutenant Colonel Murray Sanders, who arrived in Yokohama via the American ship Sturgess in September 1945. Sanders was a highly regarded microbiologist and a member of America’s military center for biological weapons. Sanders’ duty was to investigate Japanese biological warfare activity. At the time of his arrival in Japan, he had no knowledge of what Unit 731 was.[69] Until Sanders finally threatened the Japanese with bringing the Soviets into the picture, little information about biological warfare was being shared with the Americans. The Japanese wanted to avoid prosecution under the Soviet legal system, so, the morning after he made his threat, Sanders received a manuscript describing Japan’s involvement in biological warfare.[104] Sanders took this information to General Douglas MacArthur, who was the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers and responsible for rebuilding Japan during the Allied occupations. MacArthur struck a deal with Japanese informants:[105] he secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731, including their leader, in exchange for providing America solely, with their research on biological warfare and data from human experimentation.[6] American occupation authorities monitored the activities of former unit members, including reading and censoring their mail.[106] The Americans believed that the research data was valuable and did not want other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, to acquire data on biological weapons.[107]

            The Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal heard only one reference to Japanese experiments with “poisonous serums” on Chinese civilians. This took place in August 1946 and was instigated by David Sutton, assistant to the Chinese prosecutor. The Japanese defense counsel argued that the claim was vague and uncorroborated and it was dismissed by the tribunal president, Sir William Webb, for lack of evidence. The subject was not pursued further by Sutton, who was probably unaware of Unit 731’s activities. His reference to it at the trial is believed to have been accidental. Later in 1981, one of the last surviving members of the Tokyo Tribunal, Judge Röling, had expressed bitterness in not being made aware of the suppression of evidence of Unit 731 and wrote, “It is a bitter experience for me to be informed now that centrally ordered Japanese war criminality of the most disgusting kind was kept secret from the court by the U.S. government.”[108]

            Critics argue that racism led to the double standard in the American postwar responses to the experiments conducted on different nationalities.[109] Whereas the perpetrators of Unit 731 were exempt from prosecution, the U.S. held a tribunal in Yokohama in 1948 that indicted nine Japanese physician professors and medical students for conducting vivisection upon captured American pilots; two professors were sentenced to death and others to 15–20 years’ imprisonment.[109]

            It just keeps going.

            Separate Soviet trials

            Although publicly silent on the issue at the Tokyo Trials, the Soviet Union pursued the case and prosecuted 12 top military leaders and scientists from Unit 731 and its affiliated biological-war prisons Unit 1644 in Nanjing and Unit 100 in Changchun in the Khabarovsk war crimes trials. Among those accused of war crimes, including germ warfare, was General Otozō Yamada, commander-in-chief of the million-man Kwantung Army occupying Manchuria.

            Official silence during the American occupation of Japan

            As above, during the United States occupation of Japan, the members of Unit 731 and the members of other experimental units were allowed to go free. On 6 May 1947, Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces, wrote to Washington in order to inform it that “additional data, possibly some statements from Ishii, can probably be obtained by informing Japanese involved that information will be retained in intelligence channels and will not be employed as ‘war crimes’ evidence”.[6]

            According to an investigation by the The Guardian, after the end of the war, under the pretense of vaccine development, former members of Unit 731 conducted human experiments on Japanese prisoners, babies and mental patients, with secret funding from the American Government.[114] One graduate of Unit 1644, Masami Kitaoka, continued to perform experiments on unwilling Japanese subjects from 1947 to 1956. He performed his experiments while he was working for Japan’s National Institute of Health Sciences. He infected prisoners with rickettsia and infected mentally-ill patients with typhus.[115] As the chief of the unit, Shiro Ishii was granted immunity from prosecution for war crimes by the American occupation authorities, because he had provided human experimentation research materials to them. From 1948 to 1958, less than five percent of the documents were transferred onto microfilm and stored in the US National Archives before they were shipped back to Japan.[116]

            Ultimately, inadequate scientific and engineering foundations limited the effectiveness of the Japanese program.[122][123] Harris speculates that US scientists generally wanted to acquire it due to the concept of forbidden fruit, believing that lawful and ethical prohibitions could affect the outcomes of their research.[124]

            So glad US nuked civilians so they could have sole occupation of Japan.

            jesus-christ

      • cfgaussian@lemmygrad.ml
        17·
        1 year ago

        I didn’t name the option because it was implied. The option was: don’t use the nuclear bombs. Everything else stays the same. The Japanese would have still surrendered within the same timeframe. There would have been no stretched out negotiations for precisely the reason i laid out, namely that every day that they did not surrender their position wrt the Soviet Union became worse and worse. And there is no evidence to suggest that the bombing of civilians, either in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or in the firebombing of Tokyo and other cities, did anything whatsoever to bring about the unconditional surrender any faster.

        Murdering civilians does not compel fascist regimes to surrender because - newsflash! - fascists don’t value human life. The bombings of civilians in Germany by the western allies also had no effect on the timing of the Nazi defeat, and neither did the same actions in Japan. And in fact this does not just apply to fascist states, killing civilians is simply not an effective strategy in war in general. The Nazis didn’t achieve anything with their bombing raids on London, they would have been better off had they kept focusing on military targets. Killing civilians in the erroneous belief that this will intimidate your enemy into surrender is called terrorism, and moral judgements aside it is simply a fact that that is a counterproductive strategy.

        Nowadays the Kiev Nazi regime are also under the similar delusion that if they just hit enough civilian targets in Russia this will somehow destabilize Russia or scare Putin into backing off. It is not working, and entirely unsurprisingly is having the exact opposite effect.

      • silent_water [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
        9·
        1 year ago

        Japan had been trying to surrender for months before the bombs were dropped. the US could have simply accepted the terms and executed the military leaders. instead they dropped the bombs, accepted the terms, and inducted the worst war criminals into the US military.