Was America justified in dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Question

I need this for a debate in which I am stating that America was not justified. Pls help by giving me valid points.

Answer 1

Given those holding to the propaganda line I am compelled to assert a definite no!

Months before the Japanese had been fielding inquiries for a neutral party to help in negotiating terms for surrender with the main problem being the status of the Emperor. This for those who may have more naive concepts on this question is no small problem because the last civil war in Japan henged on the restoration of the Meiji compounded by a want of isolationism.

Two weeks before the drop the Russians had declared an intent to join the Allies against Japan so even the cop out notion that it would have cost hundreds of thousands of lives is false speculation.

Most importantly given the situation why couldn't the States call a short term cease fire to demonstrate the bomb on a mutually agreed un-populated island.

America has a very vendictive personality. One answer I read calls the attack on Pearl Harbour dasterdly, which is a popuplar enough claim but doesn't that make Washington's attack on Valley Ford even more so. Pearl Harbour was a Militay Base and Americans had been sending support against Japans expansions at a time in which it refused to maintain diplomacy with her.

America under Doolittle also bombed Tokyo earlier in the war, not as any part of a real stratergy but to demonstrate just how spiteful and vendictive it could be!

About !00 years before the war Japan considering the West to be ill mannered barbarians and so attempted to isolate itself as it had for nearly 200 years. The West answered with the Black Ships of Admiral Perry forcing their want and Japan into it's counter modernization. A modernization that saw Europe attempting to colonize as much of Asia and Africa as they could get their hands on and logically Japan began staking out a piece of Asia for Asians! The methods may have been doubious but the cause in WW2 was clear, and only by understanding this full lesson can we really comprehend even the most basic sense of human nature. In that, America is no angle!

Answer 2

To determine if the US was justified, you should try to find out why the US dropped the bomb as well as some facts on Japan's role in starting the war in the Pacific and their committing unspeakable atrocities before and during the war.

An important why is a thing called "Total War" which in short had the goal of destroying a county's ability to wage war, (see link). At the point when the bombs were dropped, 60+ million people had been killed. It's impossible to calculate if more or fewer people would have died if the bombs had not been dropped The planners who dropped the bomb could only see what had happened, not what would happen.

You might also look at the bombing of other Japanese cities, (see Tokyo link).

You might also look at the Potsdam Declaration, (see link), issued by the allies on July 26, 1945 demanding Japans immediate surrender. The surrender was rejected and the bomb was dropped on August 6, 1945.

Answer 3

For starters, the perception that atomic bombs are any different from a moral standpoint than plain old regular bombs is a postwar fashion. At the time, it was just another weapon, although admittedly a powerful one (provided it worked the way the scientists said it would). Secondly, I don't see that Japan would have surrendered without an invasion of the home islands. Even completely deprived of petroleum products and other strategic supplies, the Japanese would have fought, and fought fiercely, if one can take their defense of other islands as an example. Yes, many lives were lost in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Many more, both Japanese and Allied, would have been lost in an invasion of Japan itself. Even after the Bombs, a sizable and strong faction of the Japanese government wanted to fight on. It required the intervention of The Emperor himself to put down that faction. We can sit here half a century later and debate it all day, but the atomic bombs dropped on Japan brought the war to an end and saved lives.

Answer 4

I don't think anyone or any country can justify the type of weapon used. The resultant radiation is still causing cancers and deformities and pain and suffering. How would American's feel if two of their cities had been atomic bombed and were still dealing with radiation caused diseases and conditions and births of deformed children more than fifty years later?We would call it an atrocity!
We jump up and down when we think a country has chemical or biological weapons! Do we consider them justified? Well then if Saddam Hussain wasn't justified in using chemical weapons on the Curds....how can America possibly justify dropping atomic bombs....just as chemical and biological...capable of changing DNA and causing mutations and messing up the environment. Sure the war against Japan was shortened but does that method justify that end?
I once thought no war was justified but because of all the what ifs I'm now not sure. What if Hitler wasn't stopped? What if Japan won the war and land-grabbed all over the Pacific?We are told if Japan wasn't stopped we in New Zealand would be speaking Japanese, driving Japanese cars and using Japanese appliances. (If we weren't all killed if Japan occupied us) ...guess what ...we are learning Japanese and we have schools for Japanese to learn English, driving Japanese cars and using Japanese appliances!
Is war justifiable at all? Should we fight back in self-defence? What does war ever achieve?
But then I know Hitler had to be stopped but of course the methods were conventional weapons.
I passionately wish wars were only fought by leaders and soldiers who want to be there. The killing of innocent civilians and especially children can never be justified. Its just plain wrong that people who don't want to kill anyone, or who don't hate anyone, are killed. The human race is so stupid to think war solves anything! We haven't learnt anything.
But dropping bombs and sending rockets, and suicide bombings happen and should the ones who do this be allowed to continue. Still people kill and are killed. Every little act of aggression propergates more violence and death. There is so much hatred in the Middle East and all around the world.

Answer 5

I am an American so you my assess my biases.

I say yes, the atomic bombing of 2 large cities were justified

1. Japan launched the war with a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor.
2. Japan used Kamikaze attacks
3. The war was fought beyond the laws of war by Japan, execution and torture of POW's, slaughter and rape of civilian non-combatant Chinese and other subjugated people.
4. The Japanese had vowed publicly and often to prosecute the war until the last Japanese civilian had sacrificed for the Emperor, and the culture had demonstrated that this was no idle threat.
5. The combat deaths in the Pacific were 92,000 US forces versus 1.5 million Japanese forces.
6. The US projection of US losses in the envent of a land invasionof Japan exceeded 1 million causalities.
7. If 1 million Allied troops were lost the resulting Japanese loses would exceed 16 million, since the Allied troops would be facing poorly armed civilians.
8. The fire bombings of Tokyo and Yokahoma had greater civilian losses than did the atomic attacks.
9. The approx. 300,000 deaths from the atomic bombings were a more humane way to end the war than the probable 16 million conventional deaths likely to result from a land invasion of the home islands.
10. The attacker in an aggressive war must be shown NO mercy until they have been COMPLETELY defetated so as to deter future aggressive war instigators.
11. The atomic bombs also prevented Soviet occupation of Korea and Japan which would have been exceedingly brutal on the civilians, witness the post-war atrocities in Eastern Europe.

Answer 6

I would first show some pictures of Hiroshima and Nagasaki after they dropped the A-bomb. And then I would ask everybody what in the whole world could possibly justify such atrocities. Greed? I would think so...And this is equally true for all the atrocities the Japanese committed during WWII.

But just because others did it...well that is a quite pathetic reason to respond in the same way.

Answer 7

I doubt that this question will ever be settled once and for all. The argument for the atomic attacks is that they forced the Japanese to surrender before an invasion of the home islands occurred, sparing countless US and Japanese lives. The counter-argument is that Japan was already on the verge of surrender and that at best the attacks sped up the surrender by a mere few days.

One factor that needs to be included in the debate is the role of the Soviet Union. It was already decided beforehand that the USSR would declare war on Japan in early August, which they did on the 8th. For the week or two that the USSR and Japan was at hostilities, the Soviet Union took the southern half of Sakhalin Island and entered northern Korea. If the war was to have gone on by even a week or two, it might have been possible that the Soviet Union would have been co-occupiers of Japan, much like the case of Germany. Shortening the war in the Pacific probably saved Japan from being divided into two rival zones like Korea is.

I don't know if that was sufficient reason for destroying two cities and killing over a hundred thousand people, but it is something that might be useful to bring up in a debate on the issue.

Good luck in your debate.

Answer 8

My personal POV is that it was justified because it saved lives on both sides and spared Japan from potential Soviet occupation a la east/west Germany. I've lived in Japan and I can tell you a lot of Japanese feel that way.

If I had to take the opposite tack I would say that it was a weapon that indiscriminately killed civilians, although the same is true of conventional strategic bombing at the time.

Another argument against the a-bomb is that it has allowed the Japanese to avoid their responsibility for their war crimes by playing the victim. The Germans on the other hand have done a lot more to atone for their sins. That bothers other Asian a LOT more than it does Americans.

Answer 9

The US was justified. We were at war with an enemy who attacked us... for NO reason. We were not involved in World War II aside from sending Aid to the Allies. Once we got involved in retaliation for the attack on Pearl Harbor we cleaned house. After Europe was liberated we were still at war with Japan and many American lives were lost in the Pacific theater.

Germany and Japan were in the process of building Atomic Bombs and were near completion, for fortunately for us we completed it successfully first. We enlightened Japan to the fact that we had such a weapon and gave them the option to surrender or "suffer prompt and utter destruction" which they declined. In order to end the war far more quickly and save American lives from being lost continuing the war on the land, sea, and air we used the bomb. Two days later Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed and Japan surrendered.

Don't get me wrong, it's unfortunate that so many civilians were killed, but would it have been better to continue spending billions of dollars and losing thousands of American lives unnecessarily? Especially when they were working on the same kind of weapon which we had no idea how close to completion it may have been. If they had completed the bomb first would they not have used it? It was a difficult decision for Harry Truman to make, but I believe he made the right one... war is hell.

As for the wensminime... you may want to do some research into how Saddam Hussein got the chemical and biological weapons... from our government, when they supported him and even put him in place in a coup to take control of Iraq.

Answer 10

hell YES!

The Battle of Okinowa proved invading the Japanese mainland was going to be a horrendous ordeal to BOTH allied forces and Japanese civilians "civilian losses in the battle were at least 150,000. American losses were over 72,000 casualties" (link below)

Many military historians believe that Okinawa led directly to American use of the atomic bomb, on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A prominent holder of this view is Victor Davis Hanson, who states it explicitly in his book Ripples of Battle. The theory goes: "because the Japanese on Okinawa, including native Okinawans, were so fierce in their defense (even when cut off, and without supplies), and because casualties were so appalling, many American strategists looked for an alternative means to subdue mainland Japan, other than a direct invasion. This means presented itself, with the advent of atomic bombs, which worked admirably in convincing the Japanese to sue for peace, without American casualties. Ironically, the American conventional fire-bombing of major Japanese cities (which had been going on for months before Okinawa) was far more effective at killing civilians than the atomic bombs and, had the Americans simply continued, or expanded this, the Japanese would likely have surrendered anyway. Nevertheless, the bombs were a powerful symbolic display of American power, and the Japanese capitulated, obviating the need for an invasion of the home islands."