| Yet until a credible leadership figure actually _offered_ unconditional surrender, it was going to be war as usual. But it wasn’t. The A-bombs were quite unusual. They were extraordinary weapons, and would have required extraordinary justifications to use on the military, let alone on civilians. (To the argument that it wasn’t possible to target the military apart from civilians: that’s exactly why nuclear weapons are so problematic.) it deliberately ignores both the wide diversity of opinion which existed within Japanese leadership An alternate interpretation is to not take it alone, and to see it as deliberately summarizing the wide diversity of opinion which was already going through the complex process that you rightly point out. News of Nagasaki’s destruction interrupted a meeting by the Japanese Supreme War Council, not so much about whether to surrender as about how. I don’t think it’s facile at all to call this, in context, “ready to surrender”. The US did not know the details of the meeting, of course, but they chose to spend 70,000 human lives on an assumption with no particular justification, while under no special immediate military threat – at that point, Japan was relatively contained, and the fear was that if left alone it would reach out again in a matter of months or decades, not weeks. The threat was diplomatic: that Japan might surrender to the USSR. That seems worth presenting as something other than the rueful conduct of justified, proportional warfare as an absolute last resort. As an American, sometimes I look at other countries that haven’t come to terms with major war crimes – the Armenian Genocide, for example, or indeed Imperial Japan’s crimes in China – and I shake my head. Then I remember that the US has the A-bombs on our record, and we’ve made it almost 70 years now without admitting as a nation (meaning in standard textbooks, in mainstream entertainment, etc.) that these were, by any sensible definition, crimes against humanity of the highest gravity. There’s this objection people sometimes raise: that it’s easy to say these things if you weren’t there, if you weren’t under the pressures of command, knowing your nation’s people were dying by the day. That’s true. I don’t know what that was like. It’s easy for me to moralize from a distance. But that argument isn’t actually justifying the act of the A-bombings, merely moderating judgment on the people who did it. Saying they didn’t really know what they were doing is very different from it was a good idea. |
If you haven't already, do some research on how the Japanese fought at Okinawa. At the defensive plans they had in place for defending the Home Islands. The toll of an invasion would have been horrendous for both sides. This is without dispute by serious historians.
Your idea that the Japanese were "relatively contained," implying that there was no need to do any further action is almost laughable as a military or political strategy.
When you go to war, you should go to war til the other side cries "Uncle."
Furthermore, the idea that war should be "proportional" is also a sophomoric argument without merit. War is hell for a reason. If someone engages you in war, you fight them to the death. You don't go back and forth in a tit for tat manner that negates all of your advantages and magnifies theirs.
And to lump the A bombs with what Japan did to China? Read up on the Rape of Nanking. Or find out how many Chinese civilians the Japanese Army killed on the mainland. Or how they treated POWs during the Bataan Death March.
War is hell.