Also, I haven’t read all the comments here, but from what I did I didn’t see anything about the role of the Soviets. It’s fairly obvious that the bomb was used at least as much to impress Stalin as the emperor.

It’s not so obvious with area bombings in Europe, but it’s probably a part of the reason there as well. In Europe they wanted to move as far East as possible as quickly as possible to control more territory and leave less for the Soviets.

I seem to remember from Slaughterhouse-Five that Germans did carry gas masks around in Dresden, so apparently they fully expected it.

And they didn’t do the sort of planning required to invade japan as a “just in case we need to someday” sort of thing. They can do a lot more of that now than they could then, but the claim is mostly for smokescreen purposes. Like, when they train people to do that sort of thing they surely give them exercises. “Plan an invasion of sweden given such-and-such assumptions.” “Plan an invasion of peru given such-and-such assumptions.” Etc. And of course they store the finished homework as if they might find it useful someday. And then when we’re actually planning an invasion of iran, say, and people find out, then they trot out that tired old claim. “Oh, we make all kinds of plans just in case, haha we have plans to invade sweden and peru, it doesn’t mean anything.” Except it does. I’ll put it this way, by the time they’ve shipped a million tons of munitions and gear to support a plan, that plan has become difficult to cancel and it’s very very different from the homework exercises.

You say they did area bombing just because they could. They could have bombed with nerve gas, and they didn’t. They felt it was better not to do that. Goering later claimed that we should have, that it would have ended the war sooner. (I don’t remember whether he said 6 months or a year sooner.) When germany got big oil shortages they switched a big part of their resupply effort to horses. All along the eastern front they confiscated whatever horses they could find. And they limped along that way. But they never got a workable gas mask for a horse. if we’d killed the horses the war would have been over sooner. However, we refused to take that step. We claim we didn’t use poison gas even against the japanese who couldn’t have retaliated. The japanese resuply system got so confused that their poison gas stocks were dispersed and partly forgotten. They trusted us not to use gas even though they couldn’t retaliate, and we didn’t.

I think part of the difference was that chemical agents got used in WWI and the memory was still fresh. Nobody wanted to go through that again. Effective area bombing was not yet available, and there was no consensus that it mustn’t be used. Then both sides did use it, and it would be hard to stop from there. And after the war the americans believed that nukes were our trump to stop the USSR, so we certainly weren’t willing to agree we’d stop doing area bombing at that point.

I’m not claiming that this sort of thing is moral. I’m saying that if you want to avoid it, you have to work things out so you don’t get stuck doing it. If you don’t want to eat pork brains, then don’t go off on a 3-day camping trip with no food except 9 cans of pork brains. Make your choices when they’re easy, not after you’re hungry and you’ve given yourself no good alternatives.

I think the problem with your theory about the plans that are too difficult to cancel is that typically they develop all kinds of plans, logistics for any possible turn of events.

Also, I think they (not ‘we’, I don’t have anything to do with it) used area bombing simply because they could. There is no other reason. You need to make a distinction between politicians grandstanding (‘this is moral’/’that is immoral’) and politicians using the means they have to achieve objectives they desire. These are two completely different occasions that have nothing to do with each other. Or, rather, the former is an instance of the latter, but no more than that. Churchill advocated using poison gas in Iraq in the 1920s, for chrissake.

The primary concern here wasn’t a-bombs but area bombing. If we had had agreements with the germans and the japanese not to bomb cities—we could attempt to bomb factories but not attempt to bomb whole cities at random—then we probably wouldn’t have had the mindset to nuke hiroshima. We would have gone ahead and made nukes in case the enemy made them and used them, but we wouldn’t have nuked cities by default. But we didn’t have that agreement.

We didn’t have the mindset to make that agreement. And that led us into tit-for-tat. I’m not a military historian, but the way I heard the story, in the battle for britain the nazis were making some serious gains in the air war—bombing airfields or something like that—and Churchill looked for a way to get Hitler to make a mistake. Churchill ordered citywide airstrikes on berlin—not attempting any particular military targets, just dumping bombs on the city. Hitler got mad and ordered area strikes on london, and he stopped the attacks which had been effective. And so he lost that air battle. And both sides felt like they needed to bomb enemy civilians to cheer up their own civilians who were upset about being bombed.

And so nukes looked like just the same thing, only easier to do. Our nukes at that time weren’t particularly worse than a successful firebombing attack, just much easier to deliver and more likely to be “successful”.

Then there’s the question why we had to invade if we didn’t use nukes. Why couldn’t we try some alternative? Even if a blockade didn’t work, we could try it for awhile before we started an attack that was estimated to cost us a million casualties. When I think about it, it looks like we didn’t have those choices available. Once we decided to schedule the attack on the home islands we couldn’t just delay it.

“Amateurs think about strategy, professionals do logistics.” The invasion demanded a gigantic supply effort, a careful balancing act. We had to move a tremendous number of men and gigantic amounts of material. It strained our shipping and our warehousing. And it was all planned with paper and typewriters. No computing capacity. Sliderules, not calculators. Anything that disrupted that planning would have ripple effects—maybe tidal wave effects. Put off the invasion for a month and you have to feed all the men who’re sitting at random places in the pipeline, and you have to move up food to replace what they eat, and the guys with the sliderules and typewriters have to reschedule on short notice.

Once the invasion is planned—say, six months of planning and at least six months of actually moving stuff around—then if the diplomats can delay the invasion by two months that’s worth a major battle for the japanese. Not only do they get 2 months to prepare their defenses, but our offense has been thoroughly disorganised.

Once we had half the supplies moving for the invasion, we could not stop. Only an actual surrender could justify the bedlam we’d get from delaying. Surrender negotiations that had not yet produced a surrender weren’t enough.

“Mercy is the ability to stop.” We couldn’t afford mercy.

The japanese surrender attempts were inside our OODA loop. We couldn’t pay attention to them because we couldn’t stop the invasion in time. Only the bomb could give us the distraction it took to stop the invasion and plan an occupation without the bloody invasion first.

Could we have gotten around that? Build more transport, more warehousing at every little island we stopped at, ship more reserves of all the supplies we might need…. Maybe we could have planned in a way that gave us more flexibility. It didn’t fit our mindset. We were dedicated to ending the war as quickly as possible. A tremendous number of people had their lives on hold, for the duration, and we wanted it over. So we scheduled the invasion about as early as we could, and we didn’t plan to leave a million men sitting for a few months waiting for the diplomats to dicker, before the negotiations broke down and they could get off of guam and okinawa etc and storm the beaches. Maybe it didn’t have to be that way. But it was almost inevitable that it would be that way.

This sort of thing is not unusual. The way I heard it, when WWI started everybody mobilised their troops. If the other guy attacks and your troops are still disorganised at home, you lose. But then the plan was to move the troops over the railroads, and there was no plan to have them sit in place waiting to move. They had to start moving. And from there—once the decision was made to mobilise the troops, there was no opportunity not to actually start fighting WWI.

After Saddam invaded kuwait, it took us a year to move all the men and supplies into position to attack. Saddam started talking like he was willing to negotiate, but it was too late. After we moved millions of tons of munitions in place we were not going to go home with those bombs unexploded.

Once Bush II had sufficient excuse to invade iraq, it took six months to move the supplies into place. Our logistics have improved a whole lot since WWII, when turkey decided at the last minute not to let us invade through their border, we moved the troops around with barely a hiccup. Saddam talked surrender and Bush wouldn’t let him. We were not going to leave those munitions unexploded.

It’s possible that lots of times, things that later look like moral choices were made earlier, when they looked like mere tactical or logistical choices with no moral dimension.

Imagine you’re in a bar, minding your own business, and somebody comes up and attacks you. You hit him in the head with a beer bottle. He doesn’t fall down so you hit him some more. Later the autopsy establishes that any one of your blows should have knocked him out, and you battered him to death without necessity. But you didn’t know that, in the heat of the moment all you noticed was that he was still standing and he looked like a threat. It wasn’t that you were some kind of monster who wanted to kill an unconscious man. Your moral choice was to defend yourself, and you didn’t notice when that slid into murder. It could happen to anybody.

Our choice to firebomb japanese cities wasn’t like that, it was something we grew into. early in the war when things looked bleak we got a burst of enthusiasm when we could make an ineffective air raid on tokyo. A few planes, bomb the city because they didn’t have the luxury to do something precise. We didn’t consider it immoral when it was our only way to strike back, and we didn’t change our minds later.

But our choice to invade japan despite the predicted horrible destruction when something else might have worked better, was that way. We had to make the plans early before we knew how it would be. Once we were underway we didn’t know how to stop the invasion without messing ourselves up.

“Reluctant”? Obviously not enough. And next time try reading the words actually written (see, in particular, the conclusion of my comment #138) before slurring their author.

As for your screen name, it was you who chose it. In light of your pompous insults and gross mischaracterisations, it doesn’t seem at all inappropriate.

As I said above, I have been reluctant to enter seriously into this discussion as it became increasingly dominated by the kind of obnoxious idiots of whom you are an exemplar. Please bugger off and take your miserable apologetics for mass murder with you.

In fact it is you who are the latecomer to this thread and with a comment (#127) that added nothing to the discussion but a useless ad hominem about Mr. Kamm. A practice which you then repeated against another interlocutor in comments #134 and #136. So the sum of your contributions to this thread consists of insults to Mr. Kamm and two other entirely serious commenters. My citation of your homonym was meant to point this out. If you’ve made any argument that furthers our understanding of the ethics of dropping the atomic bomb in 1945, I must have missed it. Heed your own advice and bugger off.

Now where did I read words like these before? Oh, yes…

Then it is war. ‘A ceaseless fight to the death’ with Slavdom, which betrays the Revolution, a battle of annihilation and ruthless terrorism—not in the interests of Germany but of the Revolution!

The next world war will cause not only reactionary classes and dynasties but also entire reactionary peoples to disappear from the earth. And that too would be progress.

Among all the nations and petty ethnic groups of Austria there are only three which have been the carriers of progress, which have played an active role in history and which still retain their vitality-the Germans, the Poles and the Magyars. For this reason they are now revolutionary. The chief mission of all the other races and peoples-large and small-is to perish in the revolutionary holocaust.

Author of the above? Friedrich Engels.

From his “Democratic Panslavism” and “Hungary and Panslavism”, as quoted by Diane Paul “ ‘In the Interests of Civilization’: Marxist Views of Race and Culture in the Nineteenth Century” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 42, No. 1. (Jan. – Mar., 1981), pp. 115-138.