Japanese soldiers training women to fight expect Allied invaders with sharpened bamboo spears. Quora
2. Japanese Leaders’ Dishonorable Notions of Honor
Japanese leaders’ dishonorable notions of honor meant that the estimated cost of an invasion of Japan was upwards of a million Allied casualties, and tens of millions of Japanese, most of the latter civilians. Compared to that, the 200,000 casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki were an acceptable price. Morally speaking, there was nothing exceptional about the innocent victims of the atomic bombings that would have justified sparing them at the cost of the millions of other lives that would have been lost elsewhere had the war continued.
Another untrue narrative about the atomic bombings posits that Japan was nuked because of racism against the Japanese. The theory goes that atomic bombs were not dropped on Germany because the Germans were Caucasian, and neither the US government nor US public opinion would have stomached nuking them. The Japanese on the other hand were racially different, which made the decision to nuke them easier. While there was undoubtedly intense racism against the Japanese during the war, far exceeding that directed at the Germans, the theory is untrue for a variety of reasons.
Japanese schoolgirls training to fight off expected Allied invasion soldiers with pointy sticks. Flickr
1. The Untrue Narrative That Racism is Why Japan Was Nuked While Germany Was Not
It is untrue that racism had anything to do with why Japan was nuked bombed while Germany was not. Germany was not atomically bombed for a simple reason: it surrendered before the atomic bomb was ready to drop on anybody. Germany surrendered unconditionally on May 8th, 1945. The first atomic bomb was successfully tested on July 16th, 1945, more than two months after Germany’s surrender. The US atomic program began with a letter from Albert Einstein to FDR advising him of German research into atomic weapons and the danger should Hitler get an atomic bomb first. Nuclear research was viewed and pursued as a life and death race to beat Germany to the atomic punch. The entire goal of the Manhattan Project was to develop atomic bombs to drop on Germany before Germany developed atomic bombs to drop on America and its allies.
The Germans were fortunate in that they surrendered before the Manhattan Project bore the fruits that had been intended all along for Germany. Also, nuclear weapons were not viewed at the time with the same repugnance with which they are viewed today. Far from horrific last resort weapons whose use would be unthinkable except in the direst emergency, atomic bombs in August of 1945 were new weapons whose potential and impact had not yet been thought through. They were simply seen as another bomb, albeit a big and exceptionally devastating one. Modern abhorrence of nuclear weapons did not exist to the same extent when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. Thus, if the US had atomic weapons before Germany’s surrender, there would have been little reason to refrain from dropping them on German cities.
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Where Did We Find This Stuff? Some Sources and Further Reading
