Break Response - Hiroshima

Aim: Should the U.S. have dropped the atomic bomb on Japan? 

1)    First list the arguments from your reading.

2)    Research arguments from both sides 

Homework Assignment: How would you answer today’s aim?  Using the information you have collected type a one page response that incorporates what you have learned and your personal feelings on the question?


EXTRA CREDIT: 3-5 pages consider both sides of the issue and persuade us which side is correct!

Below are a collection of resources and articles to help you create an informed response!  Pl

Why the bomb was needed or justified:

•               The Japanese had demonstrated near-fanatical resistance, fighting to almost the last man on Pacific islands, committing mass suicide on Saipan and unleashing kamikaze attacks at Okinawa. Fire bombing had killed 100,000 in Tokyo with no discernible political effect. Only the atomic bomb could jolt Japan's leadership to surrender.

•               With only two bombs ready (and a third on the way by late August 1945) it was too risky to "waste" one in a demonstration over an unpopulated area.

•               An invasion of Japan would have caused casualties on both sides that could easily have exceeded the toll at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

•               The two targeted cities would have been firebombed anyway.

•               Immediate use of the bomb convinced the world of its horror and prevented future use when nuclear stockpiles were far larger.

•               The bomb's use impressed the Soviet Union and halted the war quickly enough that the USSR did not demand joint occupation of Japan.

Why the bomb was not needed, or unjustified:

•               Japan was ready to call it quits anyway. More than 60 of its cities had been destroyed by conventional bombing, the home islands were being blockaded by the American Navy, and the Soviet Union entered the war by attacking Japanese troops in Manchuria.

•               American refusal to modify its "unconditional surrender" demand to allow the Japanese to keep their emperor needlessly prolonged Japan's resistance.

•               A demonstration explosion over Tokyo harbor would have convinced Japan's leaders to quit without killing many people.

•               Even if Hiroshima was necessary, the U.S. did not give enough time for word to filter out of its devastation before bombing Nagasaki.

•               The bomb was used partly to justify the $2 billion spent on its development.

•               The two cities were of limited military value. Civilians outnumbered troops in Hiroshima five or six to one.

•               Japanese lives were sacrificed simply for power politics between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

•                 Conventional firebombing would have caused as much significant damage without making the U.S. the first nation to use nuclear weapons.

60 Years Later 
Considering Hiroshima.
  Victor Hanson

For 60 years the United States has agonized over its unleashing of the world’s first nuclear weapon on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945. President Harry Truman’s decision to explode an atomic bomb over an ostensible military target — the headquarters of the crack Japanese 2nd Army — led to well over 100,000 fatalities, the vast majority of them civilians.

Critics immediately argued that we should have first targeted the bomb on an uninhabited area as a warning for the Japanese militarists to capitulate. Did a democratic America really wish to live with the burden of being the only state that had used nuclear weapons against another?

Later generals Hap Arnold, Dwight Eisenhower, Curtis LeMay, Douglas Macarthur, and Admirals William Leahy and William Halsey all reportedly felt the bomb was unnecessary, being either militarily redundant or unnecessarily punitive to an essentially defeated populace.

Yet such opponents of the decision shied away from providing a rough estimate of how many more would have died in the aggregate — Americans, British, Australians, Asians, Japanese, and Russians — through conventional bombing, continuous fighting in the Pacific, amphibious invasion of the mainland, or the ongoing onslaught of the Red Army had the conflict not come to an abrupt halt nine days later and only after a second nuclear drop on Nagasaki.

Truman’s supporters countered that, in fact, a blockade and negotiations had not forced the Japanese generals to surrender unconditionally. In their view, a million American casualties and countless Japanese dead were adverted by not storming the Japanese mainland over the next year in the planned two-pronged assault on the mainland, dubbed Operation Coronet and Olympic.

For the immediate future there were only two bombs available. Planners thought that using one for demonstration purposes (assuming that it would have worked) might have left the Americans without enough of the new arsenal to shock and awe the Japanese government should it have ridden out the first attack and then become emboldened by a hiatus, and our inability to follow up the attacks.

As it was, after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, General Tojo’s followers capitulated only through the intervention of the emperor. And it was not altogether clear even then that Japanese fanatics would not attack the Americans as they steamed into Tokyo Bay for the surrender ceremonies.

These are the debates that matured in the relative peace of the postwar era. But in August 1945 most Americans had a much different take on Hiroshima, a decision that cannot be fathomed without appreciation of the recently concluded Okinawa campaign (April 1-July 2) that had cost 50,000 American casualties and 200,000 Japanese and Okinawa dead. Okinawa saw the worst losses in the history of the U.S. Navy. Over 300 ships were damaged, more than 30 sunk, as about 5,000 sailors perished under a barrage of some 2,000 Kamikaze attacks.

And it was believed at least 10,000 more suicide planes were waiting on Kyushu and Honshu. Those who were asked to continue such fighting on the Japanese mainland — as we learn from the memoirs of Paul Fussell, William Manchester, and E. B. Sledge — were relieved at the idea of encountering a shell-shocked defeated enemy rather than a defiant Japanese nation in arms.

About a month after Okinawa was finally declared secure came Hiroshima. Americans of that age were more likely to wonder not that the bomb had been dropped too early, but perhaps too late in not avoiding the carnage on Okinawa — especially when by Spring 1945 there was optimism among the scientists in New Mexico that the successful completion of the bomb was not far away. My father, William Hanson, who flew 39 missions over Japan on a B-29, was troubled over the need for Okinawa — where his first cousin Victor Hanson was killed in the last hours of the battle for Sugar Loaf Hill — when the future bomb would have forced Japanese surrender without such terrible loss of life in 11th-hour infantry battles or even more horrific torching of the Japanese cities.

Hiroshima, then, was not the worst single-day loss of life in military history. The Tokyo fire raid on the night of March 9/10, five months earlier, was far worse, incinerating somewhere around 150,000 civilians, and burning out over 15 acres of the downtown. Indeed, “Little Boy,” the initial nuclear device that was dropped 60 years ago, was understood as the continuance of that policy of unrestricted bombing — its morality already decided by the ongoing attacks on the German and Japanese cities begun at least three years earlier.

Americans of the time hardly thought the Japanese populace to be entirely innocent. The Imperial Japanese army routinely butchered civilians abroad — some 10-15 million Chinese were eventually to perish — throughout the Pacific from the Philippines to Korea and Manchuria. Even by August 1945, the Japanese army was killing thousands of Asians each month. When earlier high-level bombing attacks with traditional explosives failed to cut off the fuel for this murderous military — industries were increasingly dispersed in smaller shops throughout civilian centers — Curtis LeMay unleashed napalm on the Japanese cities and eventually may have incinerated 500,000.

In some sense, Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only helped to cut short the week-long Soviet invasion of Japanese-held Manchuria (80,000 Japanese soldiers killed, over 8,000 Russian dead), but an even more ambitious incendiary campaign planned by Gen. Curtis LeMay. With the far shorter missions possible from planned new bases in Okinawa and his fleet vastly augmented by more B-29s and the transference from Europe of thousands of idle B-17s and B-24, the ‘mad bomber’ LeMay envisioned burning down the entire urban and industrial landscape of Japan. His opposition to Hiroshima was more likely on grounds that his own fleet of bombers could have achieved the same result in a few more weeks anyway.

Postwar generations argued over whether the two atomic bombs, the fire raids, or the August Soviet invasion of Manchuria — or all three combined — prompted Japan to capitulate, whether Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a stain on American democracy, or whether the atomic bombs were the last-gasp antidote to the plague of Japanese militarism that had led to millions of innocents butchered without much domestic opposition or criticism from the triumphalist Japanese people.

But our own generation has more recently once again grappled with Hiroshima, and so the debate rages on in the new age of terrorism and handheld weapons of mass destruction, brought home after an attack on our shores worse than Pearl Harbor — with more promised to come. Perhaps the horror of the suicide bombers of Japan does not seem so distant any more. Nor does the notion of an extreme perversion of an otherwise mainstream religion filling millions with hatred of a supposedly decadent West.

The truth, as we are reminded so often in this present conflict, is that usually in war there are no good alternatives, and leaders must select between a very bad and even worse choice. Hiroshima was the most awful option imaginable, but the other scenarios would have probably turned out even worse.

— Victor Davis Hanson is a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. His website is victorhanson.com.

The Dropping of the Atomic Bombs on Japan Cannot Be Justified

Japan was on the verge of surrender.

·      More than 60 of its cities had been destroyed by conventional bombing

·      Its islands were being blockaded by the American Navy

·      The Soviet Union had entered the war by attacking Japanese troops in Manchuria

·      By 1945 it was only a matter of time before Japan lost the war and so arguments suggesting that only the atomic bombs could have ended the war are false.

The USA could have tried harder to get a Japanese surrender.

·      The Americans were demanding “unconditional surrender” and would not agree to the Japanese keeping their Emperor

·      The Japanese people believed that their Emperor was a God-like figure and would never agree to him losing his position as leader.

·      This needlessly prolonged Japan's resistance.

There was no need to drop the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki

• In using the bomb, the United States could have chosen an uninhabited or military target. Such a show of force was also likely to have convinced Japan's leaders to quit, without killing many people.
• The United States should have made much more effort to warn the Japanese of the potential power of atomic weapons as a method of convincing the Japanese to surrender.
• In fact the power of the bombs was never explained to the Japanese leaders.
• The two cities were of limited military value. Civilians outnumbered troops in Hiroshima five or six to one.

Dropping the Atomic Bombs was morally wrong

·      Using the atomic bombs on civilian targets was morally wrong and against the Geneva Convention. This says that bombings should be carried out against military targets.

·      Hiroshima and Nagasaki had almost no military value.

·      The cities were chosen because they had not been bombed previously and America wanted clean targets to measure the impact of the atomic weapons.

·      In effect, some 250,000 people lost their lives so the U.S. could conduct a test, which is an atrocity.

Dropping the second bomb can never be justified

• Even if people can argue that Hiroshima was necessary to force the Japanese to surrender, the U.S.A did not give enough time for word to filter out of its devastation before bombing Nagasaki.
• The truth is that the USA wanted to try out a second bomb.
• Scientists at Los Alamos had built two bombs, the plutonium bomb which was dropped on Hiroshima and a uranium bomb.
• Hiroshima had shown the effectiveness of the plutonium bomb, but another mission was needed to see what damage a uranium bomb could do.
• The people of Nagasaki where therefore killed so that America could test its second bomb. The people of Nagasaki died to show the Americans how powerful their uranium bomb was. This makes the bombing a war crime.

The Atomic Bombs were not like conventional weapons.

• The bombs melted the eyes and skin and left people with injuries much more horrific than the worst casualties from ordinary bombing.

·       Several women had the intricate designs from their Kimonos burned into their flesh

• The radiation released from the bombs caused radiation sickness, which killed many thousands of people, who had managed to survive the initial blast, because the      radiation was carried on the wind.
• The radiation is one of the main reasons why the bombings can be seen as a war crime.
• Atomic bombing cannot be compared to conventional bombing because of the factor of the radiation poisoning, which leads to cancers such as Leukaemia.
• The radiation released from the bombs is still causing problems in Japan today, where babies are still being born with disabilities as a result of the atomic bombs.

The Americans chose to sacrifice the lives of Japanese civilians to protect the lives of US soldiers.

• The main argument for the dropping of the bombs is that invading Japan would cause high US casualties. Dropping the bombs did save US soldier’s lives, but civilians are not supposed to protect soldiers with their lives.

The bombings were more about keeping the Russians out of Japan

• The real reason America used these weapons was to show Russia that the US possessed them.  
• America wanted to prevent the Russians from becoming more involved in the war against Japan.
• America was due to invade in November 1945 and by this time the USSR would have fought long enough to have want involvement in Japan at the end of the war.
• Dropping the bombs brought the war to a speedier end and meant that the USSR could have no say in what happened to Japan.
• Dropping the bombs also gave the Americans and advantage in the Cold War against the USSR, because the bombings showcased the full destructive power that the U.S. had available.
• Japanese lives were sacrificed simply for power politics between the U.S. and the USSR.

Dropping the bombs cannot be justified

• The only legal deaths in war are military deaths.
• To plan on the basis that civilians will die to save military deaths is not legal under international law.
• To say that the U.S. was justified in dropping the bombs, one would have to believe that "the end justifies the means" but here the means was the appalling death of civilians,
• Bombs of this magnitude can never be justified, especially against civilians.

Other arguments

• The bomb was used partly to justify the $2 billion spent on its development.
• Conventional firebombing would have caused as much significant damage without making the U.S. the first nation to use nuclear weapons.

The Dropping of the Atomic Bombs on Japan Was Justifiable.

Why the bombs were needed or justified:-

• In 1945 the war between the US and Japan in the Pacific had been raging for almost 5 years
• The Japanese had demonstrated fanatical resistance, fighting to the last man on the Pacific islands and unleashing kamikaze attacks at Okinawa.
• Calls for Japan to surrender were ignored by their military leadership
• Had the atomic bombs not been used, a full-scale invasion of Japan would have been necessary; resulting in hundreds of thousands more lives being lost.

The cost in lives of an invasion:-

• In August 1945, hundreds of thousands of GIs, who had managed to survive the war in Europe, were getting ready to leave for the Pacific. There they would meet up with a million more young US recruits, to start fighting the Japanese. At least 50-80% of these soldiers were expected to die in the invasion of the Japanese home islands, which everyone believed would be a bloodbath.
• The two battles held immediately before it was decided to drop the atomic bombs were Iwo Jima and Okinawa. In these battles the Japanese fought to the death and the cost in American casualties was horrific.
• It was predicted that the invasion of the Japanese mainland at the Island of Kyushu -- scheduled for November of 1945 -- would be even worse.
• The Americans believed that the entire Japanese military and civilian population would fight to the death.
• American casualties -- just for that initial invasion to get a foothold on the island of Japan would have taken up to an estimated two months and would have resulted in up to 75,000 to 100,000 casualties with up to 20,000 dead.  And that was just the beginning.
• Once the island of Kyushu was captured by U.S. troops, the remainder of Japan would follow, with enormous casualty figures.
• It is difficult to estimate the cost in injuries and lives of a full-scale land invasion, however military historians have suggested that there would have been a minimum of 250,000 US casualties and possibly as many as 1 million Japanese civilian casualties.
• It is not beyond the possibility that up to or more than 500,000 Americans could have been killed had they landed because the Japanese were ready and waiting for the land invasion.
• A major problem was that many of the roads around the landing areas were too small for the US tanks and without the tanks playing a major role, casualties would have been severe.

The Japanese were not willing to consider surrender:-

• The Japanese system of honor taught that death was preferable to surrender.
• This meant that the Japanese people believed surrender was a disgrace so terrible that they could never give in.
• Conventional firebombing had killed 100,000 in Tokyo but this had had no affect on the Japanese military government.
• The Japanese military government was fanatical and needed a strong message to force them into surrendering.
• There were still hundreds of thousands of the Japanese military in Japan and women were being trained to fight. Propaganda stories of what the Americans would do to them if they surrendered meant that most were determined to fight to the death, rather than surrender.
• Japanese men, women and children were willing to die for the emperor.

Dropping the bombs saved lives

• Hiroshima and Nagasaki would have been firebombed anyway, before any land invasion had taken place.
• More Japanese people would have died from a prolonged campaign of conventional firebombing.
• The use of the bombs ended the war with Japan more quickly and, consequently, saved more lives.
• The largest number of people killed in a single raid was not at Hiroshima, but at Tokyo, with conventional firebombs. Some 80,000-100,000 people killed. This type of bombing would have continued until the end of the war.
• The atomic bomb gave Emperor Hirohito the argument he needed to persuade the military that the time had come for Japan to surrender. It was one thing to surrender in the face of battle against an enemy with conventional bombs and weapons. It was another thing to face the force of the new atomic weapons.
• In fact the atomic bombs actually killed fewer Japanese per city and than conventional firebombs.
• The dropping of the bombs took many fewer Japanese lives than if the USA had tried to invade Japan, because the Japanese casualties were expected to be 5 to 10 times that of the Allies in an invasion.
• While the atomic bombs, just as like any bombs, were a terrible way to die, in the long run it saved lives and brought WW 2 to an end.
• How many Japanese would have died as America invaded the islands of Japan?
• Every city could have been levelled.
• In this destruction, what the bullets and bombs didn't kill the diseases that followed would finish. Certainly the figure would have far exceeded those that died from the two bombs that were dropped.
• After having fought through Iwo Jima, Saipan, Guam, and Okinawa, there was no doubt that the Japanese people and their leaders would fight until the last man, woman, and child.
• If the Emperor had not instructed his subjects to stop fighting after Nagasaki they were prepared to resist tanks and artillery with sticks and stones until the last man, woman, and child perished.

All nations in WWII killed civilians

• All the countries involved in the war killed civilians.
• The British night time bombing of the German cities killed at least 300,000 civilians and injured up to 800,000 more. The German cities were devastated. Incendiary bombs created fire storms, where the flames ‘ate’ up all the oxygen and sucked in oxygen from the surrounding areas at such speeds that hurricanes were made which pulled everyone into them.
• Hamburg was one of the cities that suffered a firestorm-                                                                                            “... Children were torn away from their parents’ hands by the force of the hurricane and whirled into the fire."   Written by Hamburg’s police chief in 1943.
• There was little distinction between civilians and soldiers in WWII because of the industrial nature of the war. The military needed the civilians to make the weapons, tanks and bombs they needed and the other side needed to destroy that industrial capacity.
• So cities with industrial capacity were targets for each side to bomb and civilian casualties were seen as unavoidable
• There was also a deliberate tactic of bombing civilians to foster terror. The British hoped the bombing of the German cities would make the German people turn against Hitler.

The Japanese were not innocent

• Just four years earlier the Japanese invaded us at Pearl Harbor without warning, bringing the US into World War II. We at least gave Japan a warning and they still wouldn't surrender.
• The Japanese committed many atrocities in World War Two, against the Chinese, the Koreans, in Singapore and against their British prisoners in camps, where they were starved and beaten.

All war is unjust but the dropping of the Atomic bombs was not a war crime.

• The USA had a right to drop the bomb, under international law of the time because the Japanese had started the war with America when it attacked the US fleet at Pearl Harbor, without warning.
• The USA committed no crime of any national or international kind when dropping the Atomic bombs. America was at war with Japan and the objective of war is to defeat your enemy and keep your own men alive.

Japan wanted to bomb the US

• The Japanese also had a secret atomic bomb project. There can be no doubt that the Japanese would have used it against America it if they perfected the bomb in time.

It was the Atomic bombings that ended the war

• Japan was not about to surrender. Even after the bombs, when the Emperor Hirohito was surrendering, a group of diehard military officials tried to steal his tape of surrender. The coup failed but it shows that some of the Japanese military would never have given in.
• The U.S. asked Japan to surrender before the dropping of the first bomb, but there was no response.
• After the first bomb the Japanese were asked again to surrender and yet again there was no response and so the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki.
• Even after the second bomb was detonated, the Japanese still did not surrender for another week. The US kept up round the clock conventional bombing of the other Japanese cities until the moment of surrender.

Other arguments

• Some people argue that the Americans should have dropped a bomb on a remote area, without a civilian population, to show them what could happen to them. However, with only two bombs ready it was too risky to "waste" one in a demonstration.
• Immediate use of the bomb convinced the world of its horror and prevented future use when nuclear stockpiles were far larger.
• The bomb's use impressed the Soviet Union and halted the war quickly enough so that the USSR did not demand joint occupation of Japan.
• The atomic bombs ended a conflict which the Japanese were largely responsible for starting.