Question

HELP!? Explore the possible reasons for the U.S. decision to drop two atomic bombs on Japan.
Were we justified? Why or why not?

Answer 1

This is a very tough question to answer and it can be argued that there is no "right" answer at all. The best that you can do as a student is to look at both sides of the argument and make your own decision.

Many believe it was justified because they forced Japan's surrender avoiding a costly land invasion by the US. They literally ended the war. At that point, we knew that Japan's soldiers would almost always fight to the very end. The human cost was believed to be incredibly high if we decided to invade the home islands so the bomb was used to save (American) lives. To put things even more simply, it was either sacrifice thousands and thousands of our soldiers, or use the bomb to keep them out of harm's way.

On the other side of the coin, Japan's refusal to surrender had also forced President Truman into a corner. By the time we had the bomb, Japan was all but crushed. Its navy was wrecked and a large portion of its army was trapped in Asia because there were no more ships to take them back to Japan. The pilots they were throwing at the Americans at that point were just bodies in planes because nearly most of their veterans were dead. Yet they still refused to surrender.

On the other hand, some do not believe it was justified because of the horrific effects that it inflicted on the survivors, most of whom were civilians. Those who survived often did with terrible, life crippling burns. Radiation and the fallout from the bombing also contributed to the spread of cancers and other debilitating diseases which were unexpected. The bomb was such as new weapon, no one could have guessed what the after effects would have been like.

But like I mentioned before, Japan was all but defeated at that point. The US navy blockaded its ports and began starving them out of everything such as raw materials to build weapons with to food. Our bombers were burning their cities day and night. There was nothing they could really do to fight back, so using the bomb would seem completely unnecessary from that perspective.

It's up to you, though. Which viewpoint do you think you could live with and why? That's the more important question.

Answer 2

They were dropped for the obvious reason: to end the war as fast as possible, and with the loss of as few lives -- both American and Japanese -- as possible. It was thought the invasion of Japan scheduled for late 1945 and early 1946 might cost as many as 1 million lives on both sides. The loss of 80,000 lives in Hiroshima, if it could bring the war to a rapid close, was considered an excellent trade.

The point was to convince the Japanese government not just that they would lose -- that was obvious already -- but that they would lose without being able to inflict any pain on American troops and families back home (who would see their fathers, brothers and sons come home in boxes). It's one thing to go down fighting, taking two of Them for every one of You, and quite another and much more degrading thing to be simply slaughtered like rats by nuclear fire from 20,000 feet, delivered by pilots who were perfectly safe from any retaliation or defense you could muster. And so it proved: the first bomb was dropped August 6, the second August 9, and on August 10 the Imperial Japanese government communicated to the Allies its willingness to surrender.

Was it justified? It's hard to see how, if you are fighting a war and planning on winning it, you can ethically decide to win it more slowly, at greater cost. You might as well argue that policemen should not be allowed to shoot at criminals holding hostages, because it's a hideous mess if they end up shot in the head. Blood everywhere, et cetera.

The only plausible ethical argument I've ever heard is that, by actually using atomic weapons, the United States gave up the moral high ground in later negotiations with the Soviet Union. That is, when both the Americans and Soviets declared that their respective awesome nuclear arsenals were for strictly peaceful reasons -- to defend only -- the Soviets could (and frequently did) point out that only the Americans had ever actually used a nuclear weapon, and it was clearly not 100% necessary, because the US could have beaten Japan without it.

It has also been argued that once nuclear weapons were used, it was forever much harder for the world to forswear them. Had they not been used, their actual effect would have always remained theoretical, and perhaps not been as compelling.

While these are logically and ethically sound arguments, I find them both completely unpersuasive. There is no historical evidence at all that nations are ever moved by ethical considerations in their security policies, certainly never enough to put their own security at (what they see to be) serious risk by giving up a very powerful weapon that could be used to defend themselves. So I think the moral high ground would have been worth approximately squat to the United States after the war, and I don't think for a moment that the USSR (or other nations) would have hesitated to develop and deploy nukes, once the US had shown it could be done through the Trinity Test.

If you want to argue nuclear weapons might never have been built if the Manhattan Project itself had never occured -- if no bomb had ever been built at all, no even a test object -- that is much more plausible. That is arguably why we do not have biological weapons of mass destruction.

Answer 3

I should also say I think you;'d be on stronger moral ground to argue that the Pacific War of obliteration waged against the Japanese by the Americans was itself unethical, and that if, for example, the United States had confined itself to some punitive action for the Pearl Harbor attack, regaining the Phillipines, and assisting Australia to defend itself, and not insisted on actually conquering Japan and destroying its governing culture, then the atomic bombing would never have been necessary in the first place.

That is, once the decision of total war and unconditional surrender was taken, the atomic bombings probably became ethically unavoidable. It's like, you can decide to kill a cow and eat it or go vegetarian. But if you decide to eat meat, it would be unethical to kill the animal slowly, by bleeding it with a penknife, because you're horrified by the huge spray of blood if you lop its head off with a giant blade.