Americans are often taught that the bombings resulted in less loss of life than a conventional land invasion of the home islands. So it's not quite a matter of "A-bomb good". Plenty of Americans alive today lived through the Cold War too, and spent years or decades in low-level fear of nuclear war. It's not quite as simple as "nukes good therefore no criticism of nukes in movie". Part of the interest in things like the Manhattan Project is the grim context of what happened next, and of the alluring eeriness of radiation and nuclear weapons in general.
Yes, but the American views about specifically Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem different from most other countries, or at least from Japan. Outside the US it is quite common to view the bombings as war crimes, while this is uncommon in the US. This probably influenced how "Oppenheimer" handled the matter.
(A comparison would perhaps be the difference between a Russian and a Polish film about the Sowjet invasion of Poland. The history here is viewed very differently in the Russian/Polish public.)
Here in Sweden I can't recall such discussions. Large casualties from battles in Leningrad and Berlin involved millions of civilian deaths, but it mostly the actions made afterward when citizens surrender that get classified as a war crime and not the battle itself. Even explicit bombing of citizens, like The Blitz, are usually not refereed as a war crime even if it should fit the definition.
However, when discussing wars occurring in modern time, aerial and artillery bombardment that hit civilian targets do get refereed as war crime. Anti-personnel mines has also been added, which is seen as a war crime by most countries except for those who continue to use them.
Near as I can tell, the nukes were far less of a war crime than the fire bombings (which killed far more). And the fire bombings get far less press.
Nukes are far more sensational and abstract I guess, compared to the terrible reality of burning hundreds of thousands alive more slowly in their own homes.
The real moral people are rightly taking away from it is "win your wars".
And I'd assume Chinese people get to look at it from the same lens: if shit ever hits the fan, they better win whatever the price is, nothing else will even remotely matter.
True I guess. If Japan had won, it wouldn't have mattered if they started it or not, they still wouldn't have been nuked ("ethical win"? except for all the really nasty shit they were doing to everyone) and we certainly wouldn't be having any ethical hand wringing about what happened during the war.
Maybe because a lot of our grandfathers lived through the war because they didn’t have to invade the home islands of Japan. So the “lives saved” argument is a little more visceral when I wouldn’t even exist today if it weren’t for the atom bomb.
I detest how the event is always portrayed as "either nuke two cities, or launch a complete invasion of Japan." At no point are other options considers, such as nuking another target or a start of peace talks rather than only an acceptance of a vague "unconditional surrender."
It’s a complex event. Those were the high level options, which remove the political factors.
In the context of being in the middle of bombing campaigns of cities, the moral turpitude of mass killing of people was long pushed aside. Total war meant everyone was part of the war effort.
So you’re left with a couple of factors. The prospect of invasion, the likelihood of getting a peaceful settlement, and the prospect of Soviet involvement.
Bombing and starvation wasn’t working fast enough to cause the intransigent military junta to bend. I think the idea was that the shock of atomic bombing would empower the collapse of the government, and cow the Soviets.
At the end, they came to the table, and the US accepted a conditional surrender.
Personally, I think if folks are going to be intellectually honest about the atomic bombings, you have to have the same position and advocacy for scaled destruction of cities in general. The firestorms, created by napalm and phosphorus and inflicted on Tokyo, Dresden and Hamburg among others were no less a horror. Decrying the tool allows people to explain away from the context. A more efficient killing machine doesn’t make the killing any more or less righteous. I think the Japanese perspective of this has been around embracing the pursuit of peace. A worthy goal that we’ve abandoned.
The Japanese came to the table with a conditional surrender, the condition being that the institution of the Emperor remain in place. The US rejected it. The Japanese came back to the table and accepted an unconditional surrender. The US then kept the imperial system in place anyway.
> Maybe because a lot of our grandfathers lived through the war because they didn’t have to invade the home islands of Japan
I'm sure the American leadership wasn't enthused at the thought of the USSR conquering Japan and establishing a socialist state. Towards the end, the fighting stopped being about WWII and more about what came afterwards.
Without looking at the internal rail network of the USSR in 1944 - I assume the soviets had a leg up (logistically) for an invasion of Japan vs the US; having to hop from island to island in the Pacific.
Folks from South East Asian countries (I'm from Singapore) that were occupied by the Japanese army and witnessed extreme brutality, cruelty and inhumane atrocities generally rejoiced when the bombs were detonated on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Most folks that lived through that period actually wished for the US to also bomb Tokyo to annihilate the Japanese Imperial family, as they rightfully or wrongly attributed them to Japan's slide to a brutal colonizer nation.
> Yes, but the American views about specifically Hiroshima and Nagasaki seem different from most other countries
I think you mean the current view of non-American generations which have never experienced or are third or four generation of an international conflict like the WWI and/or the WWII? A lot of people died in these conflicts. They were not broadcasted by TikTok, YouTube, and/or Instagram. They where not likes.
I mean, this is an unique event in history in the context of other very unique events at a huge scale. Thinking about a war crime is trying to bring a post rationality to many events that are far from that reductionism.
Yeah, how is it surprising that the country on the receiving end of the attack has a different viewpoint?
Given the lack of collective atonement for atrocities committed by the japanese, it feels like a form of whataboutism to me.
At the end of the day, both the allies and axis powers were constantly committing war crimes by targeting civilian pops. Hopefully this never happens again, but it’s not like it was unusual for any side at this time.
War crimes vs necessary evils appear to be in the eye of each beholder. Heh, consider the U.S.' War Between the States, a/k/a Civil War, a/k/a War of Northern Aggression. Even nearly 160 years after, there's plenty of cultural controversy over who was evil and who was in the right. Even recent government banning of old flag motifs, tearing down of statues, and renaming of domestic military bases hasn't taken the wind out of those old sails.
> Outside the US it is quite common to view the bombings as war crimes,
I'm from the UK and born in the 1960s and have not heard that as a mainstream view. I've seen a bit of chatter on the Web about it, but nothing substantial.
There is very little dispute that the nuclear bombings were horrible, but it was all out war. We'd had the destruction of much of Europe including the carpet bombings and resulting firestorms causing widespread deaths. Also many of our relatives are buried in what is modern day Thailand and Myanmar after fighting on the Pacific front. WW2 was brutal on many fronts and the bombing of military, industrial, and civilian areas was a part of that, but I don't recall it being called a war crime as a child nor in most modern discussion. It was a raw fight for survival which is hard to comprehend today.
Hitler was developing atomic weaponry, despite the other many technological advances they made luckily for the world he was further behind than the allies thought as I understand.
If the war hadn't finished there, the world would be a different place. The Russians would have advanced further and it's unlike there would be a South Korea for instance. There is also the issue of did those bombings show the world what a nuclear war would be like and thus drive the stalemate of the cold war. Had they not been used in anger, would America or Russia be more casual about attacking each other in the subsequent years once they were both full armed.
> Americans are often taught that the bombings resulted in less loss of life than a conventional land invasion of the home islands.
Or, at least, less loss of American life. If The United Kingdom had not consented to the bombs and they were shelved, what are the chances the U.S. would've lost e.g. 50,000 and Japan 150,000 before surrender?
Imperial Japan was pretty much fanatically supportive of war. I’m not saying the bombings were justified but the war would have been a lot longer without it and would have almost certainly been a lot deadlier on both sides.
