Name a historian who says that it was a moral lapse.
Assistant Secretary of the Navy Ralph Bard was convinced that a standard bombardment and naval blockade would be enough to force Japan into surrendering. Even more, he had seen signs for weeks that the Japanese were actually already looking for a way out of the war. His idea was for the United States to tell the Japanese about the bomb, the impending Soviet entry into the war, and the fair treatment that citizens and the Emperor would receive at the coming Big Three conference. Before the bombing occurred, Bard pleaded with Truman to neither drop the bombs (at least not without warning the population first) nor to invade the entire country, proposing to stop the bloodshed.[11]
The 1946 United States Strategic Bombing Survey in Japan, whose members included Paul Nitze,[citation needed] concluded the atomic bombs had been unnecessary to win the war. After reviewing numerous documents, and interviewing hundreds of Japanese civilian and military leaders after Japan surrendered, they reported:
There is little point in attempting precisely to impute Japan's unconditional surrender to any one of the numerous causes which jointly and cumulatively were responsible for Japan's disaster. The time lapse between military impotence and political acceptance of the inevitable might have been shorter had the political structure of Japan permitted a more rapid and decisive determination of national policies. Nevertheless, it seems clear that, even without the atomic bombing attacks, air supremacy over Japan could have exerted sufficient pressure to bring about unconditional surrender and obviate the need for invasion.
Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.[68][69]
This conclusion assumed conventional fire bombing would have continued, with ever-increasing numbers of B-29s, and a greater level of destruction to Japan's cities and population.[70][71] One of Nitze's most influential sources was Prince Fumimaro Konoe, who responded to a question asking whether Japan would have surrendered if the atomic bombs had not been dropped by saying resistance would have continued through November or December, 1945.[72]
Historians such as Bernstein, Hasegawa, and Newman have criticized Nitze for drawing a conclusion they say went far beyond what the available evidence warranted, in order to promote the reputation of the Air Force at the expense of the Army and Navy.[73][74][75]
Dwight D. Eisenhower wrote in his memoir The White House Years:
In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.[76]
Other U.S. military officers who disagreed with the necessity of the bombings include General of the Army Douglas MacArthur,[77][78] Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy (the Chief of Staff to the President), Brigadier General Carter Clarke (the military intelligence officer who prepared intercepted Japanese cables for U.S. officials), Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz (Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet), Fleet Admiral William Halsey, Jr. (Commander of the US Third Fleet), and even the man in charge of all strategic air operations against the Japanese home islands, then-Major General Curtis LeMay:
The Japanese had, in fact, already sued for peace. The atomic bomb played no decisive part, from a purely military point of view, in the defeat of Japan.
 Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the U.S. Pacific Fleet, [69]
The use of [the atomic bombs] at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons ... The lethal possibilities of atomic warfare in the future are frightening. My own feeling was that in being the first to use it, we had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.
 Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Staff to President Truman, 1950, [79]
The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.
 Major General Curtis LeMay, XXI Bomber Command, September 1945, [80]
The first atomic bomb was an unnecessary experiment ... It was a mistake to ever drop it ... [the scientists] had this toy and they wanted to try it out, so they dropped it ...
 Fleet Admiral William Halsey, Jr., 1964, [80]
Stephen Peter Rosen of Harvard believes that a submarine blockade would have been sufficient to force Japan to surrender.[81]
Historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa wrote the atomic bombings themselves were not the principal reason for Japan's capitulation.[82] Instead, he contends, it was the Soviet entry in the war on 8 August, allowed by the Potsdam Declaration signed by the other Allies. The fact the Soviet Union did not sign this declaration gave Japan reason to believe the Soviets could be kept out of the war.[83] As late as 25 July, the day before the declaration was issued, Japan had asked for a diplomatic envoy led by Konoe to come to Moscow hoping to mediate peace in the Pacific.[84] Konoe was supposed to bring a letter from the Emperor stating:
His Majesty the Emperor, mindful of the fact that the present war daily brings greater evil and sacrifice of the peoples of all the belligerent powers, desires from his heart that it may be quickly terminated. But as long as England and the United States insist upon unconditional surrender the Japanese Empire has no alternative to fight on with all its strength for the honour and existence of the Motherland ... It is the Emperor's private intention to send Prince Konoe to Moscow as a Special Envoy ...[85]
Hasegawa's view is, when the Soviet Union declared war on 8 August,[86] it crushed all hope in Japan's leading circles that the Soviets could be kept out of the war and also that reinforcements from Asia to the Japanese islands would be possible for the expected invasion.[87] Hasegawa wrote:
On the basis of available evidence, however, it is clear that the two atomic bombs ... alone were not decisive in inducing Japan to surrender. Despite their destructive power, the atomic bombs were not sufficient to change the direction of Japanese diplomacy. The Soviet invasion was. Without the Soviet entry in the war, the Japanese would have continued to fight until numerous atomic bombs, a successful allied invasion of the home islands, or continued aerial bombardments, combined with a naval blockade, rendered them incapable of doing so.[82]
Ward Wilson wrote that "after Nagasaki was bombed only four major cities remained which could readily have been hit with atomic weapons", and that the Japanese Supreme Council did not bother to convene after the atomic bombings because they were barely more destructive than previous bombings. He wrote that instead, the Soviet declaration of war and invasion of Manchuria and Sakhalin Island removed Japan's last diplomatic and military options for negotiating a conditional surrender, and this is what prompted Japan's surrender. He wrote that attributing Japan's surrender to a 'miracle weapon', instead of start of the Russian invasion, saved face for Japan and enhanced the USA's world standing.[88]
Bombings as war crimes[edit]
Nowhere is this troubled sense of responsibility more acute, and surely nowhere has it been more prolix, than among those who participated in the development of atomic energy for military purposes. ... In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no over-statement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.[89]
Robert Oppenheimer
1947 Arthur D. Little Memorial Lecture
A number of notable individuals and organizations have criticized the bombings, many of them characterizing them as war crimes, crimes against humanity, and/or state terrorism. Early critics of the bombings were Albert Einstein, Eugene Wigner and Leó Szilárd, who had together spurred the first bomb research in 1939 with a jointly written letter to President Roosevelt. Szilárd, who had gone on to play a major role in the Manhattan Project, argued:
Let me say only this much to the moral issue involved: Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?[90]
The cenotaph at the Hiroshima Peace Park is inscribed with the sentence: "Let all the souls here rest in peace; this mistake shall not be repeated." Although the sentence may seem ambiguous, it has been clarified that its intended agent is all of humanity, and the mistake referred to is war in general.[91]
A number of scientists who worked on the bomb were against its use. Led by Dr. James Franck, seven scientists submitted a report to the Interim Committee (which advised the President) in May 1945, saying:
If the United States were to be the first to release this new means of indiscriminate destruction upon mankind, she would sacrifice public support throughout the world, precipitate the race for armaments, and prejudice the possibility of reaching an international agreement on the future control of such weapons.[92]
Mark Selden writes, "Perhaps the most trenchant contemporary critique of the American moral position on the bomb and the scales of justice in the war was voiced by the Indian jurist Radhabinod Pal, a dissenting voice at the Tokyo War Crimes Tribunal, who balked at accepting the uniqueness of Japanese war crimes. Recalling Kaiser Wilhelm II's account of his duty to bring World War I to a swift end"everything must be put to fire and sword; men, women and children and old men must be slaughtered and not a tree or house be left standing." Pal observed:
This policy of indiscriminate murder to shorten the war was considered to be a crime. In the Pacific war under our consideration, if there was anything approaching what is indicated in the above letter of the German Emperor, it is the decision coming from the Allied powers to use the bomb. Future generations will judge this dire decision ... If any indiscriminate destruction of civilian life and property is still illegal in warfare, then, in the Pacific War, this decision to use the atom bomb is the only near approach to the directives of the German Emperor during the first World War and of the Nazi leaders during the second World War.
Selden mentions another critique of the nuclear bombing, which he says the U.S. government effectively suppressed for twenty-five years, as worth mention. On 11 August 1945, the Japanese government filed an official protest over the atomic bombing to the U.S. State Department through the Swiss Legation in Tokyo, observing:
Combatant and noncombatant men and women, old and young, are massacred without discrimination by the atmospheric pressure of the explosion, as well as by the radiating heat which result therefrom. Consequently there is involved a bomb having the most cruel effects humanity has ever known ... The bombs in question, used by the Americans, by their cruelty and by their terrorizing effects, surpass by far gas or any other arm, the use of which is prohibited. Japanese protests against U.S. desecration of international principles of war paired the use of the atomic bomb with the earlier firebombing, which massacred old people, women and children, destroying and burning down Shinto and Buddhist temples, schools, hospitals, living quarters, etc ... They now use this new bomb, having an uncontrollable and cruel effect much greater than any other arms or projectiles ever used to date. This constitutes a new crime against humanity and civilization.[93]
Selden concludes, despite the war crimes committed by the Empire of Japan, nevertheless, "the Japanese protest correctly pointed to U.S. violations of internationally accepted principles of war with respect to the wholesale destruction of populations".[93]
In 1963, the bombings were the subject of a judicial review in Ryuichi Shimoda et al. v. The State.[94] On the 22nd anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the District Court of Tokyo declined to rule on the legality of nuclear weapons in general, but found, "the attacks upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused such severe and indiscriminate suffering that they did violate the most basic legal principles governing the conduct of war."[95]
In the opinion of the court, the act of dropping an atomic bomb on cities was at the time governed by international law found in the Hague Regulations on Land Warfare of 1907 and the Hague Draft Rules of Air Warfare of 19221923[96] and was therefore illegal.[97]
In the documentary The Fog of War, former U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara recalls General Curtis LeMay, who relayed the Presidential order to drop nuclear bombs on Japan,[98] said:
"If we'd lost the war, we'd all have been prosecuted as war criminals." And I think he's right. He, and I'd say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?[99]
As the first combat use of nuclear weapons, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent to some the crossing of a crucial barrier. Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University, wrote of President Truman: "He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species."[100] Kuznick said the atomic bombing of Japan "was not just a war crime; it was a crime against humanity."[100]
Takashi Hiraoka, mayor of Hiroshima, upholding nuclear disarmament, said in a hearing to The Hague International Court of Justice (ICJ): "It is clear that the use of nuclear weapons, which cause indiscriminate mass murder that leaves [effects on] survivors for decades, is a violation of international law".[101][102] Iccho Itoh, the mayor of Nagasaki, declared in the same hearing:
It is said that the descendants of the atomic bomb survivors will have to be monitored for several generations to clarify the genetic impact, which means that the descendants will live in anxiety for [decades] to come ... with their colossal power and capacity for slaughter and destruction, nuclear weapons make no distinction between combatants and non-combatants or between military installations and civilian communities ... The use of nuclear weapons ... therefore is a manifest infraction of international law.[101]
Although bombings do not meet the definition of genocide, some consider that this definition is too strict, and these bombings do represent a genocide.[103][104] For example, University of Chicago historian Bruce Cumings states there is a consensus among historians to Martin Sherwin's statement "the Nagasaki bomb was gratuitous at best and genocidal at worst".[105]
The scholar R. J. Rummel instead extends the definition of genocide to what he calls democide, and includes the major part of deaths from the atom bombings in these. His definition of democide includes not only genocide, but also an excessive killing of civilians in war, to the extent this is against the agreed rules for warfare; he argues the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were war crimes, and thus democide.[106] Rummel quotes among others an official protest from the US government in 1938 to Japan, for its bombing of Chinese cities: "The bombing of non-combatant populations violated international and humanitarian laws." He also considers excess deaths of civilians in conflagrations caused by conventional means, such as in Tokyo, as acts of democide.
In 1967, Noam Chomsky described the atomic bombings as "among the most unspeakable crimes in history". Chomsky pointed to the complicity of the American people in the bombings, referring to the bitter experiences they had undergone prior to the event as the cause for their acceptance of its legitimacy.[107]
In 2007, a group of intellectuals in Hiroshima established an unofficial body called International Peoples' Tribunal on the Dropping of Atomic Bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On 16 July 2007, it delivered its verdict, stating:
The Tribunal finds that the nature of damage caused by the atomic bombs can be described as indiscriminate extermination of all life forms or inflicting unnecessary pain to the survivors.
About the legality and the morality of the action, the unofficial tribunal found:
The ... use of nuclear weapons in Hiroshima and Nagasaki was illegal in the light of the principles and rules of International Humanitarian Law applicable in armed conflicts, since the bombing of both cities, made civilians the object of attack, using nuclear weapons that were incapable of distinguishing between civilians and military targets and consequently, caused unnecessary suffering to the civilian survivors.[108]
State terrorism[edit]
Historical accounts indicate the decision to use the atomic bombs was made in order to provoke a surrender of Japan by use of an awe-inspiring power. These observations have caused Michael Walzer to state the incident was an act of "war terrorism: the effort to kill civilians in such large numbers that their government is forced to surrender. Hiroshima seems to me the classic case."[109] This type of claim eventually prompted historian Robert P. Newman, a supporter of the bombings, to say "there can be justified terror, as there can be just wars".[110]
Certain scholars and historians have characterized the atomic bombings of Japan as a form of "state terrorism". This interpretation is based on a definition of terrorism as "the targeting of innocents to achieve a political goal". As Frances V. Harbour points out, the meeting of the Target Committee in Los Alamos on 10 and 11 May 1945 suggested targeting the large population centers of Kyoto or Hiroshima for a "psychological effect" and to make "the initial use sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized".[111][112] As such, Professor Harbour suggests the goal was to create terror for political ends both in and beyond Japan.[112] However, Burleigh Taylor Wilkins believes it stretches the meaning of "terrorism" to include wartime acts.[113]
Historian Howard Zinn wrote that the bombings were terrorism.[114] Zinn cites the sociologist Kai Erikson who said that the bombings could not be called "combat" because they targeted civilians.[114] Just War theorist Michael Walzer said that while taking the lives of civilians can be justified under conditions of 'supreme emergency', the war situation at that time did not constitute such an emergency.[115]
Tony Coady, Frances V. Harbour, and Jamal Nassar also view the targeting of civilians during the bombings as a form of terrorism. Nassar classifies the atomic bombings as terrorism in the same vein as the firebombing of Tokyo, the firebombing of Dresden, and the Holocaust.[116]
Richard A. Falk, professor Emeritus of International Law and Practice at Princeton University has written in detail about Hiroshima and Nagasaki as instances of state terrorism.[117] He said that "the explicit function of the attacks was to terrorize the population through mass slaughter and to confront its leaders with the prospect of national annihilation".[118]
Author Steven Poole said that the "people killed by terrorism" are not the targets of the intended terror effect. He said that the atomic bombings were "designed as an awful demonstration" aimed at Stalin and the government of Japan.[119]
Alexander Werth, historian and BBC Eastern Front war correspondent, suggests that the nuclear bombing of Japan mainly served to demonstrate the new weapon in the most shocking way, virtually at Russia's doorstep, in order to prepare the political post-war field.[120]
Fundamentally immoral[edit]
In 1946, a report by the Federal Council of Churches entitled Atomic Warfare and the Christian Faith, includes the following passage:
As American Christians, we are deeply penitent for the irresponsible use already made of the atomic bomb. We are agreed that, whatever be one's judgment of the war in principle, the surprise bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are morally indefensible.[121]
The bombers' chaplain, Father George Benedict Zabelka, would later renounce the bombings after visiting Nagasaki with two fellow chaplains.
Continuation of previous behaviour[edit]
This Tokyo residential section was virtually destroyed following the Operation Meetinghouse fire-bombing of Tokyo on the night of 9/10 March 1945, which was the single deadliest air raid of World War II;[122] with a greater area of fire damage and loss of life than the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima or Nagasaki as single events.[123]
American historian Gabriel Kolko said certain discussion regarding the moral dimension of the attacks is wrong-headed, given the fundamental moral decision had already been made:
During November 1944 American B-29s began their first incendiary bomb raids on Tokyo, and on 9 March 1945, wave upon wave dropped masses of small incendiaries containing an early version of napalm on the city's populationfor they directed this assault against civilians. Soon small fires spread, connected, grew into a vast firestorm that sucked the oxygen out of the lower atmosphere. The bomb raid was a 'success' for the Americans; they killed 125,000 Japanese in one attack. The Allies bombed Hamburg and Dresden in the same manner, and Nagoya, Osaka, Kobe, and Tokyo again on May 24. The basic moral decision that the Americans had to make during the war was whether or not they would violate international law by indiscriminately attacking and destroying civilians, and they resolved that dilemma within the context of conventional weapons. Neither fanfare nor hesitation accompanied their choice, and in fact the atomic bomb used against Hiroshima was less lethal than massive fire bombing. The war had so brutalized the American leaders that burning vast numbers of civilians no longer posed a real predicament by the spring of 1945. Given the anticipated power of the atomic bomb, which was far less than that of fire bombing, no one expected small quantities of it to end the war. Only its technique was novelnothing more. By June 1945 the mass destruction of civilians via strategic bombing did impress Stimson as something of a moral problem, but the thought no sooner arose than he forgot it, and in no appreciable manner did it shape American use of conventional or atomic bombs. "I did not want to have the United States get the reputation of outdoing Hitler in atrocities", he noted telling the President on June 6. There was another difficulty posed by mass conventional bombing, and that was its very success, a success that made the two modes of human destruction qualitatively identical in fact and in the minds of the American military. "I was a little fearful", Stimson told Truman, "that before we could get ready the Air Force might have Japan so thoroughly bombed out that the new weapon would not have a fair background to show its strength." To this the President "laughed and said he understood."[124]
Japanese nuclear weapon program[edit]
Main article: Japanese nuclear weapon program
During the war, and 1945 in particular, due to state secrecy, very little was known outside Japan about the slow progress of the Japanese nuclear weapon program. The US knew that Japan had requested materials from their German allies, and 560 kg (1,230 lb) of unprocessed uranium oxide was dispatched to Japan in April 1945 aboard the submarine U-234, which however surrendered to US forces in the Atlantic following Germany's surrender. The uranium oxide was reportedly labeled as "U-235", which may have been a mislabeling of the submarine's name; its exact characteristics remain unknown. Some sources believe that it was not weapons-grade material and was intended for use as a catalyst in the production of synthetic methanol to be used for aviation fuel.[125][126]
If post-war analysis had found that Japanese nuclear weapons development was near completion, this discovery might have served in a revisionist sense to justify the atomic attack on Japan. However, it is known that the poorly coordinated Japanese project was considerably behind the US developments in 1945,[127][128][129] and also behind the unsuccessful German nuclear energy project of WWII.[130][131]
A review in 1986 of the fringe hypothesis that Japan had already created a nuclear weapon, by Department of Energy employee Roger M. Anders, appeared in the journal Military Affairs:
Journalist Wilcox's book describes the Japanese wartime atomic energy projects. This is laudable, in that it illuminates a little-known episode; nevertheless, the work is marred by Wilcox's seeming eagerness to show that Japan created an atomic bomb. Tales of Japanese atomic explosions, one a fictional attack on Los Angeles, the other an unsubstantiated account of a post-Hiroshima test, begin the book. (Wilcox accepts the test story because the author [Snell], "was a distinguished journalist"). The tales, combined with Wilcox's failure to discuss the difficulty of translating scientific theory into a workable bomb, obscure the actual story of the Japanese effort: uncoordinated laboratory-scale projects which took paths least likely to produce a bomb.[132]
Nagasaki bombing unnecessary[edit]
The black marker indicates "ground zero" of the Nagasaki atomic bomb explosion.
The second atomic bombing, on Nagasaki, came only three days after the bombing of Hiroshima, when the devastation at Hiroshima had yet to be fully comprehended by the Japanese.[133] The lack of time between the bombings has led some historians to state that the second bombing was "certainly unnecessary",[134] "gratuitous at best and genocidal at worst",[135] and not jus in bello.[133] In response to the claim that the atomic bombing of Nagasaki was unnecessary, Maddox wrote:
Some historians have argued that while the first bomb might have been required to achieve Japanese surrender, dropping the second constituted a needless barbarism. However, the record shows otherwise. American officials believed more than one bomb would be necessary because they assumed Japanese hard-liners would minimize the first explosion or attempt to explain it away as some sort of natural catastrophe, which is precisely what they did. In the three days between the bombings, the Japanese minister of war, for instance, refused even to admit that the Hiroshima bomb was atomic. A few hours after Nagasaki, he told the cabinet that "the Americans appeared to have one hundred atomic bombs ... they could drop three per day. The next target might well be Tokyo."[61]
Jerome Hagen indicates that War Minister Anami's revised briefing was partly based on interrogating captured American pilot Marcus McDilda. Under torture, McDilda reported that the Americans had 100 atomic bombs, and that Tokyo and Kyoto would be the next atomic bomb targets. Both were lies; McDilda was not involved or briefed on the Manhattan Project and simply told the Japanese what he thought they wanted to hear.[136]
One day before the bombing of Nagasaki, the Emperor notified Foreign Minister Shigenori Tōgō of his desire to "insure a prompt ending of hostilities". Tōgō wrote in his memoir that the Emperor "warned [him] that since we could no longer continue the struggle, now that a weapon of this devastating power was used against us, we should not let slip the opportunity [to end the war] by engaging in attempts to gain more favorable conditions".[137] The Emperor then requested Togo to communicate his wishes to the Prime Minister.
Dehumanization[edit]
Historian James J. Weingartner sees a connection between the American mutilation of Japanese war dead and the bombings.[138] According to Weingartner both were partially the result of a dehumanization of the enemy. "[T]he widespread image of the Japanese as sub-human constituted an emotional context which provided another justification for decisions which resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands."[139] On the second day after the Nagasaki bomb, President Truman had stated: "The only language they seem to understand is the one we have been using to bombard them. When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him like a beast. It is most regrettable but nevertheless true".[140]
International law[edit]
See also: Aerial bombardment and international law
At the time of the atomic bombings, there was no international treaty or instrument protecting a civilian population specifically from attack by aircraft.[141] Many critics of the atomic bombings point to the Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 as setting rules in place regarding the attack of civilian populations. The Hague Conventions contained no specific air warfare provisions but it prohibited the targeting of undefended civilians by naval artillery, field artillery, or siege engines, all of which were classified as "bombardment". However, the Conventions allowed the targeting of military establishments in cities, including military depots, industrial plants, and workshops which could be used for war.[142] This set of rules was not followed during World War I which saw bombs dropped indiscriminately on cities by Zeppelins and multi-engine bombers. Afterward, another series of meetings were held at The Hague in 192223, but no binding agreement was reached regarding air warfare. During the 1930s and 1940s, the aerial bombing of cities was resumed, notably by the German Condor Legion against the cities of Guernica and Durango in Spain in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War. This led to an escalation of various cities bombed, including Chongqing, Warsaw, Rotterdam, London, Coventry, Hamburg, Dresden, and Tokyo. All of the major belligerents in World War II dropped bombs on civilians in cities.[143]
Modern debate over the applicability of the Hague Conventions to the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki revolves around whether the Conventions can be assumed to cover modes of warfare that were at the time unknown; whether rules for artillery bombardment can be applied to rules for aerial bombing. As well, the debate hinges on to what degree the Hague Conventions was being followed by the warring countries.
If the Hague Conventions is admitted as applicable, the critical question becomes whether the bombed cities met the definition of "undefended". Some observers consider Hiroshima and Nagasaki undefended, some say that both cities were legitimate military targets, and others say that Hiroshima could be considered a military target while Nagasaki was comparatively undefended.[144] Hiroshima has been argued as not a legitimate target because the major industrial plants were just outside the target area.[145] It has also been argued as a legitimate target because Hiroshima was the headquarters of the regional Second General Army and Fifth Division with 40,000 military personnel stationed in the city. Both cities were protected by anti-aircraft guns, which is an argument against the definition of "undefended".
The Hague Conventions prohibited poison weapons. The radioactivity of the atomic bombings has been described as poisonous, especially in the form of nuclear fallout which kills more slowly.[146][147][148] However, this view was rejected by the International Court of Justice in 1996, which stated that the primary and exclusive use of (air burst) nuclear weapons is not to poison or asphyxiate and thus is not prohibited by the Geneva Protocol.[149][150][151]
The Hague Conventions also prohibited the employment of "arms, projectiles, or material calculated to cause unnecessary suffering". The Japanese government cited this prohibition on 10 August 1945 after submitting a letter of protest to the United States denouncing the use of atomic bombs.[152] However, the prohibition only applied to weapons as lances with a barbed head, irregularly shaped bullets, projectiles filled with glass, the use of any substance on bullets that would tend unnecessarily to inflame a wounded inflicted by them, and the scoring of the surface or the soft point bullet filling off the ends of the hard cases of bullets. It did not apply to the use of explosives contained in artillery projectiles, mines, aerial torpedoes, or hand grenades.[153] In 1962 and in 1963, the Japanese government retracted its previous statement by saying that there was no international law prohibiting the use of atomic bombs.[152]
The Hague Conventions stated that religious buildings, art and science centers, charities, hospitals, and historic monuments were to be spared as far as possible in a bombardment, unless they were being used for military purposes.[142] Critics of the atomic bombings point to many of these kinds of structures which were destroyed in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.[154] However, the Hague Conventions also stated that for the destruction of the enemy's property to be justified, it must be "imperatively demanded by the necessities of war".[155] Because of the inaccuracy of heavy bombers in World War II, it was not practical to target military assets in cities without damage to civilian targets.[155][156][157][158]
Even after the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan, no international treaty banning or condemning nuclear warfare has ever been ratified. The closest example is a resolution by the UN General Assembly which stated that nuclear warfare was not in keeping with the UN charter, passed in 1953 with a vote of 25 to 20, and 26 abstentions.[141]
Impact on surrender[edit]
See also: SovietJapanese War (1945) § Importance and consequences
Varying opinions exist on the question of what role the bombings played in Japan's surrender: some regard the bombings as the deciding factor,[159] others see the bombs as a minor factor, and yet others assess their importance as unknowable.[160]
The mainstream position in the United States from 1945 through the 1960s regarded the bombings as the decisive factor in ending the war; commentators have termed this the "traditionalist" view, or pejoratively the "patriotic orthodoxy".[161]
Some, on the other hand, see the Soviet invasion of Manchuria as primary or decisive.[162][163][164][165] In the US, Robert Pape and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa in particular have advanced this view, which some have found convincing,[166][167] but which others have criticized.[168][169]
Robert Pape also argues that:
Military vulnerability, not civilian vulnerability, accounts for Japan's decision to surrender. Japan's military position was so poor that its leaders would likely have surrendered before invasion, and at roughly the same time in August 1945, even if the United States had not employed strategic bombing or the atomic bomb. Rather than concern for the costs and risks to the population, or even Japan's overall military weakness vis-a-vis the United States, the decisive factor was Japanese leaders' recognition that their strategy for holding the most important territory at issuethe home islandscould not succeed.[170]
In Japanese writing about the surrender, many accounts consider the Soviet entry into the war as the primary reason or as having equal importance with the atomic bombs,[171] while others, such as the work of Sadao Asada, give primacy to the atomic bombings, particularly their impact on the emperor.[172] The primacy of the Soviet entry as a reason for surrender is a long-standing view among some Japanese historians, and has appeared in some Japanese junior high school textbooks.[172]
The argument about the Soviet role in Japan's surrender has a connection with the argument about the Soviet role in America's decision to drop the bomb:[164] both arguments emphasize the importance of the Soviet Union. The former suggests that Japan surrendered to the US out of fear of the Soviet Union, and the latter emphasizes that the US dropped the bombs to intimidate the Soviet Union. Soviet accounts of the ending of the war emphasised the role of the Soviet Union. The Great Soviet Encyclopedia summarised events thus:
In August 1945 American military air forces dropped atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima (6 August) and of Nagasaki (9 August). These bombings were not caused by military necessity, and served primarily political aims. They inflicted enormous damage on the peaceable population.
Fulfilling the obligations entered into by agreement with its allies and aiming for a very speedy ending of the second world war, the Soviet government on 8 August 1945 declared that from 9 August 1945 the USSR would be in a state of war against J[apan], and associated itself with the 1945 Potsdam declaration ... of the governments of the USA, Great Britain and China of 26 July 1945, which demanded the unconditional capitulation of J[apan] and foreshadowed the bases of its subsequent demilitarization and democratization. The attack by Soviet forces, smashing the Kwantung Army and liberating Manchuria, Northern Korea, Southern Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands, led to the rapid conclusion of the war in the Far East. On 2 September 1945 J[apan] signed the act of unconditional capitulation. [173]
Still others have argued that war-weary Japan would likely have surrendered regardless, due to a collapse of the economy, lack of army, food, and industrial materials, threat of internal revolution, and talk of surrender since earlier in the year, while others find this unlikely, arguing that Japan may well have, or likely would have, put up a spirited resistance.[161]
The Japanese historian Sadao Asada argues that the ultimate decision to surrender was a personal decision by the emperor, influenced by the atomic bombings.[172]
Atomic diplomacy[edit]
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A further argument, discussed under the rubric of "atomic diplomacy" and advanced in a 1965 book of that name by Gar Alperovitz, is that the bombings had as primary purpose to intimidate the Soviet Union, being the opening shots of the Cold War.[174] Along these lines some[who?] argue that the US raced the Soviet Union and hoped to drop the bombs and receive surrender from Japan before a Soviet entry into the Pacific war. However, the Soviet Union, the US, and Great Britain came to an agreement at the Yalta Conference on when the Soviet Union should join the war against Japan, and on how the territory of Japan was to be divided at the end of the war.[175]
Others argue that such considerations played little or no role, the US being instead concerned with the defeat of Japan, and in fact that the US desired and appreciated the Soviet entry into the Pacific war, as it hastened the surrender of Japan.[176] In his memoirs Truman wrote: "There were many reasons for my going to Potsdam, but the most urgent, to my mind, was to get from Stalin a personal reaffirmation of Russia's entry into the war against Japan, a matter which our military chiefs were most anxious to clinch. This I was able to get from Stalin in the very first days of the conference."[177]
Campbell Craig and Fredrik Logevall argue the two bombs were dropped for different reasons:
Truman's disinclination to delay the second bombing brings the Soviet factor back into consideration. What the destruction of Nagasaki accomplished was Japan's immediate surrender, and for Truman this swift capitulation was crucial in order to preempt a Soviet military move into Asia. ... In short, the first bomb was dropped as soon as it was ready, and for the reason the administration expressed: to hasten the end of the Pacific War. But in the case of the second bomb, timing was everything. In an important sense, the destruction of Nagasakinot the bombing itself but Truman's refusal to delay itwas America's first act of the Cold War.[178]
See also[edit]
Hiroshima, by John Hersey
Nuclear disarmament
Cultural treatments of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki