[rtpg]

With existing nuclear weapons the US could easily wreck large population centers very easily. They also completely destroy a nations infrastructure. Blowing up population centers of course would be a case of indiscriminate bombing and kill tens of thousands of civilians.

In WW2, even before dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the US committed to a large bombing campaign that completely destroyed the country. The damage was so vast and total that the Japanese government did not even register Hiroshima to be unusual! Around that time other cities were also being razed to the ground, it just took more bombs to do so. During that war, in Europe and in Japan there were large bombing campaigns that indiscriminately killed many civilians. I find it hard to justify this (no, "they were doing the same" does not actually feel like a legitimate reason, especially when the narrative nowadays is that it was a battle between good and evil)

Low-yield tactical nukes seem to be playing with the idea of being able to have this option to massacre people more easily and play around with the idea of using nukes with no consequence. Higher-yield nukes seem to serve the purpose of more effectively wiping chunks of a city from a map. What magical weapon are we looking for that will make the world safer, and that accomplishes strategic objectives that are not already covered by both the existing nuclear arsenal and the conventional weapons of the US? Remember, normal bombs actually do things too!

Meanwhile, actual, legitimate No First Use policies would be much more effective at making the world a safer place. Stronger treaties to reduce nuclear arsenals, giving militaries less space to just push other countries around.

[josephcsible]

> I find it hard to justify this

What would you have done instead to reduce their civilian casualties, under the constraints that the Allies still win the war and that Allied casualties don't increase?

[rtpg]

[0] is a critique of Gladwell's book about those bombing campaigns. I do not believe it will have all the answers for you, but there is one component of truth: The US was looking for an unconditional surrender for Japan. That was a choice.

Unconditional surrender in Japan lead to the US occupational government for 9 years (along with over 20 years occupation of Okinawa, which had to be pried out of the hands of the US military, who wanted to indefinitely keep it as a colony).

Now, I'm not going to cry over Nazis or the Japanese military not being able to get a conditional surrender. But Japan is especially stark: except for a handful of high profile executions, not only did most decision makers not face punishment, many of them ended up back in the government and as heads of state. All of this more or less at the behest of the US.

What is my point? The US chose to reach for an unconditional surrender, for some pretty realpolitik objectives, prolonging the suffering of the civilians on the ground. There is decent documentation that part of this is so that the US could determine surrender conditions rather than the USSR. There is an alternate universe of a negotiated surrender that shortened the Pacific front.

What does that universe look like? I do not know. It probably would not have lead to the US having military bases all over the country. But conditional surrenders are the norm in wars. Air campaigns allow for militaries to just decide "no, we will just continue to attack forever, as we suffer few casualties anyway".

[0]: https://thebaffler.com/latest/narrative-napalm-kulwin

[panick21_]

The US basically did what no losing power ever think would happen. They do unconditionally surrender but then the US enforced pretty damn easy terms on them.

Given that they let the emperor continue, they might as well have just allowed surrender with the promise the emperor would remain. But of course that choice was not made at that point.

An what I think people need to consider is that all of WW2 basically happened because the allies did not force unconditional surrender on Germany in WW1. A mistake that many wanted to avoid. Of course famously Wilson debated this question with Henry Cabot Lodge and that disagreement is a huge part in the US rejecting Versailles. Wilson justified himself by basically formulating the two Germans theory, ie there is the evil militaristic Prussian Germany and the good German people. Henry Cabot Lodge didn't buy that.

Sean McMeekin in his new book makes the point that FDR announced the unconditional surrender doctrine basically to placate Stalin and did it basically without fully coordinating that with the British. Attempting to offer the German military some sort of deal that would have made them remove the Nazis prevent Eastern Europe falling to Communism would have been a better policy. That is of course very controversial.

And if I have learned one thing, its that unconditional surrender is always a incredibly hot issue with people passionately arguing both sides.

[TedDoesntTalk]

> the Japanese government did not even register Hiroshima to be unusual!

You need to read more non-revisionist history books.

[rtpg]

From [0]:

> In the three weeks prior to Hiroshima, 26 cities were attacked by the U.S. Army Air Force. Of these, eight — or almost a third — were as completely or more completely destroyed than Hiroshima (in terms of the percentage of the city destroyed). The fact that Japan had 68 cities destroyed in the summer of 1945 poses a serious challenge for people who want to make the bombing of Hiroshima the cause of Japan’s surrender. The question is: If they surrendered because a city was destroyed, why didn’t they surrender when those other 66 cities were destroyed?

> On August 2, you would have arrived at the office to reports that four more cities have been attacked. And the reports would have included the information that Toyama (roughly the size of Chattanooga, Tennessee in 1945), had been 99.5 percent destroyed. Virtually the entire city had been leveled. Four days later and four more cities have been attacked. On August 6, only one city, Hiroshima, was attacked but reports say that the damage was great and a new type bomb was used. How much would this one new attack have stood out against the background of city destruction that had been going on for weeks?

Of course the perspective of people who actually were on the ground is totally different. But if we are talking about strategic objectives, then how the leadership sees thing is in fact relevant!

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20160221160530/https://foreignpo...