what are the controversies about the atomic bomb? what were the causes at home to drop it??

Answer 1

The loss of life at the Battle of Okinawa, on both sides, made Truman realize that an invasion of the Japanese homeland would cause massive amounts of casualties. The decision was made to drop the bomb to avoid losing hundreds of thousands of American soldiers, as it was clear that the Japanese were not going to surrender easily.

Answer 2

Answer 1 is very good, and I will vote for it as best answer.

Just to add a point, there was little public controversy about dropping the bomb because

(a) is was a military secret, was not announced before hand, CBS did not conduct opinion polls about what Truman should do

(b) The fact that it would save American lives would be sufficient cause, in the minds of Americans, to use it.

Answer 3

The contoversies center on modern distste for deliberate bombing of civilian areas, the innacurate notion that the US govt. knew about the lingering effects of radiation, and accusations of racist motives.

Precision bombing is too recent, and not a fair comparison to the comparitively crude means available at the time. The factories in axis countries had been broken up and decentralized into residential areas. Bombing theses areas shortened the length of the war.

During the postwar years the military conducted military drills and tests involving tactical nuclear weapons, exposing quite a few solgiers to radioactive fallout, many of them developed thyroid cancer late in life as a result. I believe the program was called Aurora.

Racist propaganda was widespread, it's not nice, but it's easier to kill someone if you don't think they're really human. The leadership was very careful in picking bombing targets culturaly significant areas were given a wide berth. That doesn't seem consistant with some kind of race war attitude to me. I'd guess the leadership wasn't motivated by hardline idiological racism in tactical decisionmaking.

The capacity for precision bombing is fairly recent, and was widespread during ww2, used by all participants.

Like the other guy said, to avoid having to slaughter the people in Japan, and the hugely wasteful expediture of men and materials also factored in.

Also, Russia had just declared war on japan, Truman didn't want Russia occupying Japan because the Soviet Union had set up puppet states in countries it 'liberated' in Europe. He wanted to bring the war to a quick conclusion to prevent that from happening in Japan.

Answer 4

the main controversey was the fact that it was being dropped on non-military target to terrorize and intimidate the enemy, not to destory his capacity to make war. the sheer destructive force was too much for the job. too many civilians would die. it also was dropped on TWO sites, both civilian cities. why not just ONE? to make the point one would do.
the causes were that the people of America were worn to a frazzel with the two wars and needed to stop. Japan would not stop so we had to resort to drastic measures.
The resons given were the loss of american soldiers was going to be huge compared to europe when we invaded Japan because the resistance was too stiff. The Japanese soldiars had shown so much resistance on Iwo Jima that we figured we would lose too many lives to ferret out the enemy in their home land. So we sought a quick cheap solution and committed one of the greatest was crimes ever. fortunately we won so there was nobody who could prosecute us.
the fanatical faith of the Kamakazi suicide bombers was just a hint of how hard the japanese would fight if their emporer told them to. So we had to convince that old bastard that it would cost too much to continue and let go of his monstrous ego long enough to surrender for the good of his people. he was unwilling to do that until he saw the destructive force of our new bombs.
We should have dropped it on the damn palace and killed the emporer.