Why Truman Dropped the Bomb

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Ani Ibi:
Civilians were not targetted at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The Japanese command, materiels, and troop concentration was targetted. It so happened that these were embedded in a civilian population.
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I disagree with your analysis…but you already know that 😉

Anyway, still awaiting your response to my earlier post comparing our two positions.
 
vern humphrey:
And you may not cut a person open just to remove a cancerous tumor. You may not sink an enemy ship just to win a naval battle – who knows how many sailors may not approve of their government’s policy?

On the other hand, you MAY condemn half the population of Japan to die of starvation or hunger, because, hey, we’ll feel better about ourselves for not dropping an atomic bomb.

It is just as wrong to claim the means justify the end.
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Your counterexamples, and my position on destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all hinge on the question of whether the act is intrinsically evil. I’ve laid out earlier my argument for why destroying a city is intrinsically evil, and it has yet to be countered.

We must answer that question first before dealing with consequences.
 
Philip P:
For those who instead simply repeat that the Japanese committed atrocities, I really have to question what you wish to accomplish. I don’t think anyone here has said, or even implied, that the Japanese were moral paragons of any sort. But what does this have to do with the question of whether it was right for us to commit atrocities?

The question on this thread is whether or not it was moral to drop the bomb. Unless you’re a relativist, the fact the Japanese committed evil acts does not touch on the question of whether or not we did.
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It all comes down to what the ultimate purpose was in dropping the bombs.

What was our purpose in dropping the bombs?

Ultimately, our purpose in dropping the bombs was to get Japan to quit. If they did, lives would be saved.

However, let’s say the situation was reversed, and Japan and Germany had the bombs, and we didn’t.

Do you suppose they would have dropped a couple on us, destroyed a couple of cities, and after we quit, they’d help us clean up the damage, provide medical care for the victims, and provided us with a fair and equitable constitutional government, pouring billions of dollars’ worth of their own money into our country to get us back on our feet again, then allowing us our independance and a equal place in the community of nations alongside them?

If your answer is “yes”, then you need more help than I can give you. My influence doesn’t reach that far into the Alternative Utopian Universe.
 
Philip P:
This is still consequentialist argument. The moral principal that you may not purposely do evil that good may come of it still holds, no? I have yet to see a convincing argument that deliberately destroying a city is not intrinsically evil. There had been some interesting discussion examining this earlier, but it seems to have been dropped. Apparently we’re back to claiming that the ends justify the means.
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The ends do not justify the means. But this is beside the point.

Let us do a compare and constrast of harming civilian populations.

During the Nicaraguan revolution/counterrevolution/revolutionagain/counterrevolutionagain (and so on) a band of people claiming to be soldiers holed up in Honduras. They took drugs, forcibly confined people as sex slaves, and undertook raids into Nicaragua to apprehend people who they then threw down into deep pits and systematically tortured and killed them. These practices served no military objectives whatsoever. They were in fact counterproductive to whatever objectives either (or all) side(s) in that conflict held.

This is an example of harming civilians for the sake of harming them.

In Iraq Saddam Hussein gassed the Kurds. Frankly I think this was yet another example of harming civilians for the sake of harming them. However, for arguments sake, let us accept that Hussein gassed the Kurds in order to terrorize them and everyone else in Iraq so that his power remained secure.

This is an example (arguably) of the means justifying the ends.

In Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the object of the atomic bombing was not undertaken to harm the civilian population for the sake of harming them.

Nor was it undertaken as a means to an end.

The harming of the civilian population had nothing to do with the military objective whatsoever.

The object was to neutralize the Japanese command, materiels, and troop concentration by means of bombing them with atomic ordinance.

It so happened that the Japanese military hub was embedded in the civilian population. If it had not been embedded in the civilian population but, say, way out in the wildnerness, the object would be exactly the same – unchanged: neutralizing the Japanese command, materiels, and troop concentration by means of bombing them with atomic ordinance.

Comparison:

Like the Honduran and Iraq examples, the harming of the civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not a good thing.

Contrast:

What distinguished the harming of the civilian populations in Hiroshima and Nagasaki from the harming of the civilian populations in Honduras and Iraq was that, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the harming of the civilian population was not a central, intrinsic, and inextricable part of the object of the act.
 
Philip P:
Your counterexamples, and my position on destroying Hiroshima and Nagasaki, all hinge on the question of whether the act is intrinsically evil. I’ve laid out earlier my argument for why destroying a city is intrinsically evil, and it has yet to be countered.

We must answer that question first before dealing with consequences.
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If the act is intrinsically evil, it must be because of some good reason. What standard can we apply to Hiroshima and Nagasaki that DOESN’T also apply to the bombings of London, Berlin, Coventry and Dresden or the blockade of Japan? Or the seige of Leningrad? Or the seige and storming of Berlin?

That is the question we must answer before dealing with other points.
 
Philip P:
I disagree with your analysis…but you already know that 😉

Anyway, still awaiting your response to my earlier post comparing our two positions.
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OK. I’ve been tied up with a keffuffle which closed down the IRA thread. And I’ve been tied up with doing a Spanish translation for a thread about an anti-papist Gospel Rock band which is appearing at World Youth Day. And errands. So I am not ignoring you. I’m just my usual slow self. :o Ani.
 
vern humphrey:
I note also the author of the article claims we were waging “aggressive war” against Japan.

Yeah. Remember how the US Navy attacked the Japanese ships at anchor in Pearl Harbor, and invaded the Japanese protectorate of the Phillippines, and forced the captured Japanese to undergo the Baatan Death March?
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Darn right we were aggressive. You don’t get to the enemies door step by staying on the defensive for nearly 4 years.
 
FightingFat said:
GENERAL DOUGLAS MacARTHUR

MacArthur biographer William Manchester has described MacArthur’s reaction to the issuance by the Allies of the Potsdam Proclamation to Japan: “…the Potsdam declaration in July, demand[ed] that Japan surrender unconditionally or face ‘prompt and utter destruction.’ MacArthur was appalled. He knew that the Japanese would never renounce their emperor, and that without him an orderly transition to peace would be impossible anyhow, because his people would never submit to Allied occupation unless he ordered it. Ironically, when the surrender did come, it was conditional, and the condition was a continuation of the imperial reign. Had the General’s advice been followed, the resort to atomic weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki might have been unnecessary.”

William Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur 1880-1964, pg. 512.

Norman Cousins was a consultant to General MacArthur during the American occupation of Japan. Cousins writes of his conversations with MacArthur, “MacArthur’s views about the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were starkly different from what the general public supposed.” He continues, “When I asked General MacArthur about the decision to drop the bomb, I was surprised to learn he had not even been consulted. What, I asked, would his advice have been? He replied that he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb. The war might have ended weeks earlier, he said, if the United States had agreed, as it later did anyway, to the retention of the institution of the emperor.”

Norman Cousins, The Pathology of Power, pg. 65, 70-71.
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Oh yeah, MacArthur hated atomic weapons so much he wanted to vaporize half the Korean penninsula and half of China.
 
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wabrams:
Darn right we were aggressive. You don’t get to the enemies door step by staying on the defensive for nearly 4 years.
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While we certainly and properly took the war to the enemy, the term “aggressive war” implies a) we started it, and b) we fought to gain territory or loot.

Both are wrong – they started it, and we incorporated no new territory into the United States as a result. In fact, we granted independence to the Philippines in 1946, just as we had promised them.
 
vern humphrey:
While we certainly and properly took the war to the enemy, the term “aggressive war” implies a) we started it, and b) we fought to gain territory or loot.

Both are wrong – they started it, and we incorporated no new territory into the United States as a result. In fact, we granted independence to the Philippines in 1946, just as we had promised them.
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Oh, I know. I was just being a little sarcastic. 😃
 
Ani Ibi:
OK. I’ve been tied up with a keffuffle which closed down the IRA thread.

Are you doing some stuff on Individual Retirement Accounts?? So, which ETF’s do you like?
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Philip P:
This is still consequentialist argument. The moral principal that you may not purposely do evil that good may come of it still holds, no? I have yet to see a convincing argument that deliberately destroying a city is not intrinsically evil. There had been some interesting discussion examining this earlier, but it seems to have been dropped. Apparently we’re back to claiming that the ends justify the means.
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Back in 1944-45, there were a bunch of senior guys who were in charge of fighting the war. Now, 60 years later some next-Century morning quarterbacks are saying they could have done it more morally.

OK.

Exactly how?
 
vern humphrey:
They had also produced more armored vehicles in the last 5 months of the war than in all of 1940.

Don’t you think that if the data or the methodology could be refuted, it would have?

As you pointed out, they managed to produce 2,000 jet fighters and bombers. And as I pointed out, their production of armored vehicles was up, not down at the end of the war.

Do you have data to support that? The USSBS fairly bristles with tables and statistics which, as I pointed out, have never been shown to be inadequate or in error.

This is what is sometimes called “arguing from engineering data” – that is, arguing in the face of experience. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The Stratgeic Bombing campaign was not cost-free – and what it cost us to mount it exceeded the damage it inflicted on the Germans.

Which is the key – they could out-kill our production rate for planes and crews. We never out-killed their production rates with strategic bombing. The exception being the systemic attack on the German oil industry which accidentally wrecked their chemical industry.

Here, you are 100% correct. Compare the deaths from Hiroshima and Nagaski with the deaths expected from the invasion (both Japanese and American) and from starvation and exposure in the coming winter.
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Start with Martin Gilbert. He has written extensively on WW2.
 
Just as an aside, Truman and Churchill wanted to keep the fact of the atomic bomb secret from Stalin. But they thought they had to say something, since he was supposed to be their ally.

So when all three were together at a function, Truman approached Stalin and said something casually about having developed an important new weapon which might be used soon. Stalin said something like, “good; you should use it.”

But what Truman and Churchill failed to realize was that Stalin *already knew * all about the atomic bomb, because he had his own spies in the U.S. program.
 
vern humphrey:
They had also produced more armored vehicles in the last 5 months of the war than in all of 1940.

Don’t you think that if the data or the methodology could be refuted, it would have?

As you pointed out, they managed to produce 2,000 jet fighters and bombers. And as I pointed out, their production of armored vehicles was up, not down at the end of the war.

Do you have data to support that? The USSBS fairly bristles with tables and statistics which, as I pointed out, have never been shown to be inadequate or in error.

This is what is sometimes called “arguing from engineering data” – that is, arguing in the face of experience. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating. The Stratgeic Bombing campaign was not cost-free – and what it cost us to mount it exceeded the damage it inflicted on the Germans.

Which is the key – they could out-kill our production rate for planes and crews. We never out-killed their production rates with strategic bombing. The exception being the systemic attack on the German oil industry which accidentally wrecked their chemical industry.

Here, you are 100% correct. Compare the deaths from Hiroshima and Nagaski with the deaths expected from the invasion (both Japanese and American) and from starvation and exposure in the coming winter.
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WW2 was a fight to the finish. If we lost, we would be dead. For fun, watch the movie “Casablanca”. It was made in 1942. The last scene is a map showing the Axis conquests of the world. At that time, no one knew who would actually win the war!!!

It was that close.

And right up until near the end, it could have had a different ending. What if the Germans had offered terms to the Soviets and became allied with the Russians? That’s the likely outcome if the Normandy landings had failed.

We were prepared to fight the Germans if necessary from the U.S. That’s why we built the B-36 bomber. We were prepared to offer a home to the British government in exile. That’s why the buildings at Roosevelt Roads Naval Station in Puerto Rico are so magnificent and the naval facilities so extensive. That would have been the home to the British fleet.

We were vulnerable on Normandy for a solid month. The US Army was at war with the US Navy which is why the US Army declined to take advantage of the Navy’s experience with amphibious landings in the Pacific. We had to fight hard because the Germans were such strong adversaries, even when they were fighting defensively.

So, I repeat, what would you have done differently? If faced with “unacceptable” choices, would you have quit fighting? Gone home? Left Europe to its fate?

Generally in the face of a request for workable alternatives, generally critics just waffle.

When someone criticizes police in the heat of a “situation”, I ask what they would do in their place and when they start to say “well…”, I usually say that your time is up and you are dead.
 
Al Masetti:
We were vulnerable on Normandy for a solid month. The US Army was at war with the US Navy which is why the US Army declined to take advantage of the Navy’s experience with amphibious landings in the Pacific. We had to fight hard because the Germans were such strong adversaries, even when they were fighting defensively.
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Actually, the Army conducted more amphibious landings in WWII than the Marines. Army doctrine was a bit different, not because we didn’t listen to the Navy, but because we were fighting a different war. It’s one thing to invade an island, another to invade a continent (which the Army did four times.)
Al Masetti:
So, I repeat, what would you have done differently? If faced with “unacceptable” choices, would you have quit fighting? Gone home? Left Europe to its fate?
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Most critics remind me of a saying of me sainted Irish Mither – “Ya don’t know enough to know how little ya know.”
 
It is popular to condemn the U.S. for insisting on Unconditional Surrender. However, those who do forget that peace had been negotiated in 1871 and 1918. In 1944, I was beginning to follow the news at that age, it seemed a good idea to get this settled once and for all and not have another war in 1970 or 1980.

One may want to show our improved methods of negotiated peace these days - see North Korea or the First Gulf War.
 
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