:3 Somebody doesn't know their Japanese or German history, do they?
The Americans only started building the atomic bomb in the first place because refugees from German persecution told the US about the
Uranverein, the Nazi project to turn fission, a process discovered just months earlier, into a viable large-scale weapon. Thus, two years after the start of the German project, Oppenheimer turned the theories that German defectors had brought over and turned them into the
Manhattan Project under joint US, British, and Canadian direction, with all of the physicists he could muster who knew, either directly or indirectly, the Nazi work and wanted to make sure that they weren't the first to finish theirs. Most notably, Einstein and three other major former-European physicists, who in 1939 wrote a monstrous number of letters directly to FDR, President at the time, begging him to start a project to develop nuclear weapons capabilities.
It's not like nuclear weapons could have only existed if the US did - the Germans were developing them as soon as the process of fission was discovered, and if the US hadn't done it in '45 it was only a matter of time before somebody else decided to try it.
Now, as to why it was used against Japan, repeatedly. :3 For that, you're going to have to know a lot about Japanese history in World War II and the events leading up to the surrender. Throughout World War II, Japan had a lot of strange and peculiar philosophies. They were fighting a campaign of island-hopping, which normally consists of a few island skirmishes with limited troops and a few naval battles. The Japanese, due largely to their own styles of honor for the Emperor and all that jazz, somehow managed to take a campaign style that would normally yield minimal casualties and turn it into a genocide. In the Pacific Campaign, there were approximately 350,000 casualities. 100,000 men killed and 250,000 wounded. The Japanese, on the other hand, suffered *1,750,000* dead military men, on top of the 400,000 civilian deaths due to the diseases and famines that were spreading as a result of the war effort.
The Japanese, unfortunately, had the policy of "victory or death", which led to such fun events as the battle of Okinawa - where people would either kill themselves when defeat seemed certain or come up with desperate moves to take out as many of the enemy as possible. Tens of thousands of people committed suicide on Okinawa, and many who didn't straped grenades to themselves and pulled the pins out when they were being moved to the prisoner barracks by various soldiers. The total military deaths at
Okinawa, for the Japanese, were somewhere between 90,000 and 130,000 men, and tens of thousands of more civilians who were conscripted to fight and do work and act as shields for the soldiers.
Okinawa was considered one of the worst battles for the US in the war, casuality-wise, and even then only 12,000 died and 40,000 were wounded - most of these deaths resulting from trying to fight against suicidal men who would rush into your group and just start spraying bullets everywhere, or stuffing grenades into the bodies of their wounded friends and rigging it so that they exploded when the Americans tried to move the people to a hospital. The mere fact that only one side of the battle kept track of the number of their wounded soldiers should tell you something - the Japanese weren't fighting for the sake of their citizens, but for their country.
And they decided to do it in some desperate ways, at this point, as trying to crash
their only modern battleship, and only remaining ship of any heft into an island. :/
Anyways, the Japanese fought with insane fervor, and this fervor not only caused millions of unnecessary American deaths, but tens of millions of even crueler and worse deaths for their own civilians. :<
As the Imperial War Journal itself put it - "We can no longer direct the war with any hope of success. The only course left is for Japan's one hundred million people to sacrifice their lives by charging the enemy to make them lose the will to fight"
The surrender of Japan obviously didn't go smoothly - the Japanese were literally starving to death at home, millions of people a day were trying to blow themselves up to do as much damage as possible to the US soldiers, and all the while they knew perfectly well that they had no hope of winning.
In late July, Britain, China, and the US released the demands for the surrender of Japan. The Japanese completely refused it, and thus about two weeks later President Truman gave the orders to drop the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima. By 1950, due to cancer and other effects, this single bomb killed 200,000 Japanese citizens, approximately as many as had died at Okinawa alone. The Japanese again refused to discuss surrender, and it wasn't until three days later, when the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki (80,000 casualities - the bomb was better placed to avoid doing as much damage as the previous one had) *and* the Soviet Union (previously neutral in the US-Japanese conflict) invaded Manchuria, that the Japanese began to discuss surrender. Even then, they were divided - some pushing for the unconditional surrender and others pushing for a compromise that would have let
Japanese war criminals like those responsible for the
Rape of Nanking,
]Unit 731, and various other events that results in the deaths of over 16,000,000 Chinese civilians (yes, that's 16 with
six zeroes) get off scot-free.
At this point, the Emperor gave his approval for surrender, but within three days after his announcement to his cabinet that they were going to surrender, there was an attempted coup. The Emperor himself had to issue a broadcast message to announce the surrender, and with his entire army in a rout because they thought they were still fighting, the message didn't get out for another three days. The release of his broadcast was only possible because, when the Americans found out about the coup, they started dropping 6,000 bombs on 8 of its major cities, to try and distract and annoy the military enough to let somebody either overthrow them or to get out the message. As soon as the military found out the Emperor wanted them to surrender, and only then, did they stop. Even then, in his speech, the Emperor said that surrendering would be "enduring the unendurable and suffering what is unsufferable". Even after all the damage the civilian and military population had taken, the end of the war was not seen as a goodness but as the ultimate humiliation that had to be suffered in order to save *any* of the Japanese and their culture.
So yeah, given the above sort of attitude when the last battles were underway and the bombs were dropped, what do you think would have happened if they hadn't been? :O 200,000 people, max, were killed by the atom bombs, which was about a tenth of the number of Japanese *soldiers* who had died in the entire war, not including the hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilian deaths in *battles*. How many Japanese do you think would have died if there had been a land invasion of the Japanese mainland? There was a population of about 90,000,000 Japanese in WW2. How many of these would have pulled the same suicidal moves to try and wipe out invading soldiers?
The American estimate for the number of American dead in an invasion of Japan was between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000 - if you use the same ratios as those as Okinawa to try and guess the number of Japanese losses, they would be almost 42 million.
Now, which would have been a far more horrendous thing?
There were 200,000 dead in the wake of the atomic bomb - and there were most likely going to be 10 times as many American casualties alone if we had tried to invade to get them to surrender. And, if the pattern of Okinawa held, there would have been almost 42,000,000 Japanese deaths.
Either way, if you like people to live, one of these situations wins out. And that, good sir, is why the bomb was dropped - because the alternative was hideously, hideously worse. :3
And yeah, you're totally right. :/ This whole thing is a big daunting for a wallchat. <3
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