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On August 6, 1945, for the first time ever, a nuclear weapon was used to vaporize a city filled with human beings. Many rationalizations have been made for doing so, but after four years of Trumpism we can only look at the United States and think Are we surprised?
--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: August 6, 1945--
The simplistic argument has been often presented that the use of the bombs saved lives, and perhaps they did. Many numbers have been thrown around over time, and they’ve grown in the telling, so I won’t bother repeating. The basic argument is that nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki brought a quick end to World War II, thereby removing the need for an amphibious invasion of the home islands which would have cost significantly higher numbers of American and Japanese lives than were lost via the atomic bombings.
There is some logic to the argument, and the counterclaim that Japan was “ready to surrender anyway” is a subject of much debate. Regardless, the decision to use nuclear weaponry on Japanese cities has another component that few know or understand. It involves the former Soviet Union.
The U.S. and Russia were tenuous allies during World War II due to a common enemy. Russia was obligated by the 1943 Tehran Conference to enter the war with Japan after Nazi Germany was defeated, which happened three months previous. Under the desperate conditions of 1943, the United States welcomed help in defeating Japan, even from the USSR, but the successful testing of an atomic bomb on July 16, 1945 in the New Mexico desert created new possibilities: The U.S. could end the war quickly without Soviet assistance and thereby prevent Russia having postwar influence in how Japan was administered.
There is more. It is likely the United States also wanted to show off her new toys. There was motivation to send a “You guys really need to give up” kind of message to Japan, but also important was the need to broadcast to the Soviet Union what the bombs could do.
There were a number of reasons why the target cities were chosen, but an important one for Hiroshima was that it was a “pristine” target; it had not been hit with conventional bombs prior to its August 6, 1945 destruction via the airburst detonation of a 15-kiloton uranium nuclear device nicknamed Little Boy. (The 21-kiloton “Fat Man” dropped on Nagasaki three days later was a plutonium weapon.) Choosing Hiroshima meant the U.S. could both see for themselves and expose to Russia the full destructive power of these new weapons as a big “Whaddya think of that, you commie fucks?” As you likely know, Russia thought, Holy Jesus Fuck Farts! We need to have those too!
And so, Soviet agents stole the technology from the Americans a few years later, and the nuclear arms race began.
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Different times. Americans WERE racist then and many still are today. I'm not sure about the claim that it wasn't used on the Germans first because they are white. If Hitler WAS very close to getting atomic weapons, America would have nuked Germany. I have no doubt about that.
The Allies had been fighting the Japanese since 1941. The British and continental Europeans had been fighting the Germans before that. The Allies were tired. They wanted the war over. Period. No one cared how. The Russians and Chinese had taken brutal amounts of casualties, both military and civilian. Their casualty numbers make the American casualties look ridiculously low. I'm sure they wouldn't have cared if they had even understood what nuclear weapons were. There's was very much the sentiment that Japan had started the war and that they deserved what they got. I do know that the bomb wasn't quite ready until after the German surrender, so that may have been part of it, too.
I know that Truman was so shaken by the photographs (the ones the public didn't get to see) of the bomb's results that when the generals brought up using them in Korea, he squashed the idea immediately and said they should never have been used on civilians.
Churchill once said that "jaw, jaw, jaw, was better than war, war, war." I agree with him. That's the only way Humanity is going to survive. I'm not an apologist for the use of the bombs on Japan. I'm trying to explain the way people felt and thought at that time. We can't Monday morning quarterback their decisions and acts. So we can do is try to avoid any of them ever being used again on anyone anywhere.
I really hope they get a guy with a good Russian accent to say "Holy Jesus fuck farts!" for this scene when they make History of the Fuckin' World Part 1