Were the uses of nuclear weapons on Hiroshima and Nagasaki war crimes?

[Queen Ayras Lord Commander]

Is anyone taking the radiation into account and the effect on the future generation while saying things like whole of Japan was going to be militarised .

Were these unborn children also going to be part of the resistance ?

Although not related to war crimes :

The other issue i wonder is whether other countries would have pursued in making these weapons had the bomb not been dropped .

Let that liberal heart bleed on.

No military is going to take into account the unborn children of the enemy. Historically, most military offenses would want them to die.

Your second point is unknowable. The super powers at the time were all working to make their own bomb already. I think more countries were appalled and didn't pursue them though.

[Queen Ayras Lord Commander]

rock--

I'm not sure if any of your lengthy and admirable post, supra, goes to the question of whether the nuclear bombings were war crimes or not.

QALC--

I'm not sure if any of your short and scurrilous post, supra, goes to the question of whether the nuclear bombings were war crimes or not.

for both: y'all seem to equivocate on the issue of political/strategic necessity vs. military necessity. the latter is part of the test regarding war crimes and can exculpate; the former is a matter of aesthetics, and was a hanging offense under the CIMT.

In my first post I defined my position, in a moderately sized post. Dropping the first bomb was a war crime depending on your view if they were innocent civilians or a militia. The second bomb was likely a war crime. Either way, there were numerous war crimes committed by all sides that were far worse then dropping the bomb.

[Fez]

That doesn't make sense at all.

RtP simply states that there is a responsibility to intervene to protect civilians from their own government. That has nothing to do with changing the rules of war. It's only about why that war starts.

Its not about a change to the rules of war, its about recognizing that certain identified parties do not get to claim the same protections that are otherwise universally available. That's an important precedent.

[Weeping Sore]

What if instead of nuking Japan we had pulled a Vlad the Impaler move and nuked our own people, (say Delaware, for example) just to show how not afraid to kill innocents we were? Then Japan would have surrendered unconditionally just because we were too fucking loco.

[Arakan]

In my first post I defined my position, in a moderately sized post. Dropping the first bomb was a war crime depending on your view if they were innocent civilians or a militia. The second bomb was likely a war crime. Either way, there were numerous war crimes committed by all sides that were far worse then dropping the bomb.

You see...no reason to fight over semantics :).

No one, especially not me, will ever question that the Americans fought the "good" war.

American war crimes compared to the German ones are like drop in the bathtube.

Our entire war was a crime.

[Alarich]

I guess I just question the value of declaring something a war crime when we all agree that it almost assuredly saved thousands, if not millions of lives. That includes civilian and military lives, across many nations (Japan, US, Indonesia, New Guinea, etc).

The end justifies the means, it's a classical argument (if follows a "two deaths in inherently worse than one death" moral argument, which would be interesting for another debate), however by the only meaningful, agreed upon standard, i.e. international humanitarian law, the question wether something is a war crime is not contingent on the overall military and political objectives of the war itself.

It really is a relatively simple abstraction: you have to separate the end and the means and judge both separately.

[Maithanet]

Airplanes can be shot down, including ones carrying nuclear weapons.

And over a quarter of a million people survived the atomic blasts, so yeah, it can be survived. More people died in the firebombing of Tokyo. "Complete destruction" sounds FUCK YEAH but the reality isn't really different.

And it is indeed fuel costs you're talking about when you say "comparative ease" for the user. What else would it be? Certainly not overall cost, since the two nuclear weapons represented a vast sum in development. Maintenance and parts for aircraft?

Psychological warfare isn't rational. And it seems pretty obvious to me why continuing to fight a war against a country using nuclear weapons when you have none would be very hard on morale. The Japanese were banking on the fact that even if B-52s could level thier cities, that eventually the Americans would have to make a landing in order to truly defeat them. The atomic bombs made clear that no such landing was necessary, that Japan could indeed be utterly and totally defeated from the air. I remember in Downfall that he had quotes from Japanese officials who said exactly that in post-war interviews.

As for the Soviets, as part of the Allied forces, for all the Japanese knew they might have been lent-leased transports. Japan may not have faced "immediate" destruction from the USSR, but it wouldn't have been immediate in any case. It's a question of totality, and the level of brutality and degradation involved. Make no mistake, a Soviet invasion would have been worse than anything the Japanese had seen so far. If you were going to lose, who would you rather lose to? Stalin, or Harry Truman?

But that's just it, you yourself admit that the Japanese would have been in no hurry to surrender, so long as it was before the Russian invasion actually took place. Such delays were not acceptable to the US government when they had a weapon at their disposal that could end it much more quickly and certainly. And in the meantime, tens of thousands of people were dying under Japanese occupation across Asia.

[Ser Scot A Ellison]

Maithanet,

The Japanese were banking on the fact that even if B-52s could level thier cities, that eventually the Americans would have to make a landing in order to truly defeat them.

Don't you mean B-29's? B-52's didn't come into service until 1954.

[Maithanet]

Maithanet,

Don't you mean B-29's? B-52's didn't come into service until 1954.

Yes I do. It's just that catchy music that has enshrined B-52s into my memory.

[MerenthaClone]

Its not about a change to the rules of war, its about recognizing that certain identified parties do not get to claim the same protections that are otherwise universally available. That's an important precedent.

Well that's convenient.

[Fez]

Well that's convenient.

Blame Canada. They're the ones who asked the UN to put out a report.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

They weren't "necessary" as in "the only means" to end the war.

They did save lives - mainly American soldiers; the million lives saved argument is based on a simplistic linear prediction of how an invasion of Japan might have happened, or not. Essentially it's an argument that relies on a fictional scenario - not an unlikely one! - nonetheless, it's not a fact, it is speculative.

Dropping the bombs did serve a purpose - military and politically and it was done in the context of a just war, it also was by todays standards a war crime.

ETA

Not in the context of international humanitarian law.

Of course, when you are making up your own random "definition" of war crimes, then yes, it's a matter of your personal opinion, but then again your personal definition of a war crime is not really interesting to debate, as it has no relevance to anyone except you.

Letting the war just go on would have Korea, most of Southeast Asia and large portions of China still under Japanese occupation, likely resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths for every month the war dragged on.

[White Walker Texas Ranger]

Not so much in the Pacific War- we were "liberating" European and American colonies from another imperial power. After the war we attenuated our imperialist designs to merely include propping up pro-capitalist regimes across the region, resulting in several more wars and millions upon millions more deaths. Good thing we hastened the end of the Pacific War with the atomic bomb though to get to all that good stuff- we're perfect good and the Japanese were pure evil, of course, and our victory was a blessing to the human race.

At least in East Asia, areas that ended up under Western influence ended up doing a lot better than areas under Soviet Influence. In the long term, pro-capitalist regimes turned out great for Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, etc.

[Shryke]

Its not about a change to the rules of war, its about recognizing that certain identified parties do not get to claim the same protections that are otherwise universally available. That's an important precedent.

But that's not the same party that claims protection under the laws of war. If it's not about a change to the rules of war, then your argument makes on damn sense.

It's not even framed as a lack of protection under anything.

[sologdin]

Well it's a matter of opinion, not fact, that determines whether or not they were war crimes for an individual.

But it is undeniable that dropping the bombs saved millions of lives.

it is absolutely deniable as self-serving bullshit. the US had no right to demand unconditional surrender. no belligerent has a right to seek debellation. no one forced the US to plan an invasion. no one compelled the US to immolate japanese cities even while the US mainland was virtually unthreatened.

[Trebla]

Even after the Soviet invasion AND the two atomic bombs, there was a large contingent that wanted to fight on. They had become so divorced from reality that surrender was, essentially, unthinkable. After the Nagasaki bombing, leadership was deadlocked on how to proceed, and whether a mealymouthed surrender could be achieved. Only the Emperor was able to change their mind, and even then there was an attempted coup to kill the leaders of the surrender faction, capture the emperor and fight on.

Thank you. And that coup may well have succeeded if one of the generals, a war minister who had voted to continue the war, hadn't committed suicide rather than defy the Emperor. Again, that's after two atomic bombs had been dropped and the Red Army was beating the crap out of the Japanese in China.

[Wise Fool]

Psychological warfare isn't rational. And it seems pretty obvious to me why continuing to fight a war against a country using nuclear weapons when you have none would be very hard on morale. The Japanese were banking on the fact that even if B-52s could level thier cities, that eventually the Americans would have to make a landing in order to truly defeat them. The atomic bombs made clear that no such landing was necessary, that Japan could indeed be utterly and totally defeated from the air. I remember in Downfall that he had quotes from Japanese officials who said exactly that in post-war interviews.

Psychological warfare isn't rational, sure, but what you're doing is trying to rationalize something as being psychological warfare and moreover, some indispensable and redefining aspect of it. Fighting a war against a country using nuclear bombs is no different than fighting a country using conventional bombs when both techniques are impossible to effectively defend against and cause the same levels of devastation. If, as you say, the Japanese were banking on Americans would have to invade in order to truly win, then why would that change depending on the type of bomb used? Why would atomic bombs make it clear that the US could level the country by air, and conventional bombings would not?

I mean as we already know, the US only had the two weapons, whereas they still had metric shit-tons of conventional weaponry. The latter would still have been able to level the whole country by air, no landing necessary.

(And while Downfall might have had quotes from Japanese officials agreeing with you, we have quotes from US officials saying the bombs were not necessary. I don't think we can really use any of these in contemplating what-ifs, since they come from the perspective of hindsight, and most people will color their accounting of history with their own biases. Americans will tend to justify the use of nuclear weapons, and Japanese will tend to justify the surrender.)

But that's just it, you yourself admit that the Japanese would have been in no hurry to surrender, so long as it was before the Russian invasion actually took place. Such delays were not acceptable to the US government when they had a weapon at their disposal that could end it much more quickly and certainly. And in the meantime, tens of thousands of people were dying under Japanese occupation across Asia.

Well, I don't know, some members of the Junta might have been less or more in a "hurry" to surrender if only to save more lives. The key things were: being convinced of the unwinnable nature of the conflict as well as the consequences to losing. Use of the bomb didn't affect the latter because the effect (devastation from the air) wound up being constant throughout, or the former because one could still make the (poor) argument that strategic bombing was survivable, like some kind of siege you could survive or outlast, and this would be the case for atomic weapons (of the day, anyway) as well. But the Soviet entry into the war changed these both. The Red Army was the largest land army in the world, a force ultimately nobody could win against (not even the US, until nukes); and the consequences of Soviet occupation would be particularly loathsome to prevailing attitudes in Japan, or indeed pretty much anybody.

The way I see it, Hiroshima may have given Hirohito an excuse to sell the notion of surrender to the US, but since I'm not really privy to the discussions he and the Junta may have had on the topic I'm only guessing. And as long as I'm guessing, I'm going to assume he said, "Look, the Americans have some kind of new weapon, but Stalin's mustache creeps me the fuck out. Either way, we can't win. Let's surrender to the USA." Because that's totally what he would have said.

But Nagasaki is much harder to buy. Seems just superfluous. There's the "that way they knew we had more than just one" argument, but that seems kind of arbitrary; why was more than 1 sufficient but not more than 2?

[Queen Ayras Lord Commander]

it is absolutely deniable as self-serving bullshit. the US had no right to demand unconditional surrender. no belligerent has a right to seek debellation. no one forced the US to plan an invasion. no one compelled the US to immolate japanese cities even while the US mainland was virtually unthreatened.

Classic blame the victim diffusion.

[OnionAhaiReborn]

At least in East Asia, areas that ended up under Western influence ended up doing a lot better than areas under Soviet Influence. In the long term, pro-capitalist regimes turned out great for Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan, etc.

In the long term there's no telling what would have become of these same nations under the rule of Imperial Japan, which was also quasi-democratic, capitalist, and staunchly anti-Communist. Meaning, they instead of the USA and West would likely have engaged in, or, rather, continued to engaged in, brutal suppression of Communist and anti-colonial movements across the region costing millions of lives that by the end of the century may have yielded successful capitalist liberal democracies in a few places. So if you're all for mass killings if you can show that many decades down the road there are some capitalist success stories, the Japanese may have achieved results quite agreeable to your sensibilities.

[Galactus]

The assumption is that the next step would have been a land invasion.

It would not.

It would have been a continued conventional bombing campaign: This time outside the cities (most of these were pretty bombed out) but targeting agricultural relgions, transport networks, etc.

Historically (under US occupation) Japan had some 50,000 dead of starvation in the '45-'46 winter. Estimates from the US air force is that had the bombing campaing continued and there been no imported grain, that could have gone as high as 2 million.