Racing the enemy
In the first international history of the end of World War II in the Pacific -- the only book to fully integrate the roles of the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan -- Tsuyoshi Hasegawa traces an intricate diplomatic and military end game as he shatters standard accounts of the Japanese surrender. - Jacket flap.
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What Hacker News says
- > Even after the first nuke they didn't surrender. It took the emperor speaking up - for the first time ever - after the second nuke, and even then the military junta tried to stop it.
All this is true, but it's also true that the nukes weren't the only factor involved. A good case can be made that it was actually the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, which started at midnight local time on the same morning that Nagasaki was bombed, that gave the peace faction in the Japanese government enough leverage to get the Emperor to intercede. The Japanese still weren't exactly sure what the nuclear bombs were, and they had already been firebombed for months so having two more cities incinerated was not the huge change that later US propaganda made it out to be. But the Japanese had been trying for many months to get Stalin and the USSR to broker a peace agreement, and Stalin and Molotov had been stringing them along without any real intention of helping, to ensure that Stalin would have time to enter the war against Japan. The Soviet invasion of Manchuria shocked the Japanese government into realizing their true position and made surrender an urgent priority since Japan greatly preferred being occupied by the US to being occupied by the USSR. The nuclear bombs were a convenient way for the Emperor to save face and not have to admit that it was really the strong desire of the Japanese to surrender to the US and not to the USSR that drove the decision.
See the excellent book Racing the Enemy by Hasegawa for a detailed and thorough exposition:
https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Enemy-Stalin-Truman-Surrender/...
- > The justification at the time for nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki was field testing two different novel bomb designs
That was probably one reason, but by no means the only one, nor even IMO a very significant one (and the article you link to, which is a good one from a good historian whose entire nuclear secrecy blog is worth reading, does not make the claim you are making--it gives a number of justifications that were made at the time, and the one you give is not one of them).
The Gar Alperovitz book referenced in the article is also worth reading, as is another historical study, Racing the Enemy [1] by Hasegawa. The latter book is not solely about the decision to use the bomb, but more generally about the process by which the war with Japan ended, but that decision and the process that produced it of course play a large role.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Racing-Enemy-Stalin-Truman-Surrender/...
> it wasn't even certain at the time that this would work as a bomb
AFAIK there was no doubt that the implosion method used in the Nagasaki bomb would work after the Trinity test. And there was never any doubt that the gun-type method used in the Hiroshima bomb would work--they didn't even bother to test it before the Hiroshima bombing. The only question was what the practical yield would be under bombing conditions. But that could have been assessed by bombing tests on uninhabited locations, as was done after the war.
> it was never as clear cut and about swift endings and saving casualities as came to be believed.
People forget that atomic bomb or not the US was already committed to levelling all cities within Japan.
These things are quite true. They do not, however, mean that wanting to field test two different bomb designs was a significant factor. Based on my reading I don't actually think it was one at the political level (what the military people thought was another matter, but the key decisions were made at the political level). Politically, I think the biggest factors involved were uncertainty about what it would actually take to get Japan to surrender, and the desire (at least once Truman came into office) to keep the Soviet Union from playing any part in postwar Japan, and more generally to deter them from expanding further.
- > the goal of the bombing was to force an end to the war quickly instead of executing a protracted land invasion of the Japanese Home Islands - which probably would have killed more people (Japanese and American) than the bomb did
While this was the rationale that was published after the war by the US government, current historical scholarship indicates that it was a lot more complicated than that. To give just a few key points:
Actual casualty estimates made by the US military in the spring and summer of 1945 for a land invasion of Japan were much smaller than figures quoted (without any specific sourcing given) in rationales published after the war. The latter figures were in the range of a half million to a million casualties, but the former figures were more like tens of thousands.
While it was certainly a goal of the Truman Administration to end the war quickly, if at all possible before the Soviet Union attacked Japan, dropping the atomic bombs was far from the only feasible option for doing that. In particular, there were plenty of indications (including intercepted Japanese diplomatic messages, since the US had broken the Japanese diplomatic code years before and was routinely reading all such traffic) that clarifying exactly what "unconditional surrender" meant, and in particular what the status of the Japanese Emperor would be, would have given the peace party within the Japanese government enough leverage to force a surrender sooner.
There is also plenty of evidence that at the very least Truman and his Secretary of State, James Byrnes, wanted to drop the atomic bombs in order to make the Soviet Union more tractable diplomatically and to reverse the much more conciliatory policy towards them that FDR had taken.
And finally, the internal deliberations of the Japanese government (which were not available to historians until some decades after the war) show that the impact of the Soviet Union invading Manchuria was much greater than the impact of the atomic bombs in pushing the issue for surrender. The Japanese weren't even sure at first what the atomic bombs were, and in any case the US had been firebombing Japanese cities for months so additional bombing was not a huge shock. The Soviets, however, had been stringing Japan along for more than a year at that point, holding out some hope that Japan might be able to get a negotiated peace brokered through the Soviet Union. In fact Stalin never had any such intention; he just wanted to make sure the Japanese didn't surrender until he had a chance to enter the war against them. But Japanese leaders didn't understand that until they were forced to realize it by the Soviet invasion of Manchuria (the same morning that the Nagasaki bomb was dropped).
Two good detailed references are The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb by Gar Alperovitz and Racing the Enemy by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa.
> they also made several decisions that massively limited the amount of death - for instance, instead of picking relatively small military targets and staggering their delivery, they could've just dropped their three available bombs in one go on Tokyo, Osaka, and Nagoya and called it a day
The reason those cities were not targeted by atomic bombs had nothing to do with trying to limit deaths; they were not targeted because they had already been destroyed by firebombing in the months before the atomic bombs were ready, causing more deaths than the atomic bombs caused.
- > the now largely discredited idea that the atom bomb attack is what caused the Japanese to surrender
Do you have a source for this? I just spent 10 minutes searching, and I could find nothing compelling. The closest I could find was Racing the Enemy, which argues that it was the planned Soviet invasion that pushed the Japanese to surrender. But otherwise, the story seems a lot more complex than that, and is certainly nowhere near "discredited" to suggest the atom bomb caused the Japanese to surrender.
Further reading (and these themselves contain references to even further reading):
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/1505pek/was_...
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/15gsdme/i_un...
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/wwa2ie/were_...
https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/cawabr/were_...
- I could've phrased it better, it sounds like you're criticising something other than what I meant.
One single plane flies over Hiroshima, ignored because "that can't possibly be a threat". The air raid warning had been cleared at 07:31, and many people were outside, going about their activities.
> it had its own atomic bomb program
Two programs; it was because they were not good enough that they thought the US couldn't have had the weapons:
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The Japanese Army and Navy had their own independent atomic-bomb programs and therefore the Japanese understood enough to know how very difficult building it would be. Therefore, many Japanese and in particular the military members of the government refused to believe the United States had built an atomic bomb, and the Japanese military ordered their own independent tests to determine the cause of Hiroshima's destruction.[0] Admiral Soemu Toyoda, the Chief of the Naval General Staff, argued that even if the United States had made one, they could not have many more.[86] American strategists, having anticipated a reaction like Toyoda's, planned to drop a second bomb shortly after the first, to convince the Japanese that the U.S. had a large supply.[1]
[0] Frank, Richard B. (1999). Downfall: the End of the Imperial Japanese Empire. New York: Penguin. ISBN 978-0-14-100146-3
[1] Hasegawa, Tsuyoshi (2005). Racing the Enemy: Stalin, Truman, and the Surrender of Japan. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press. ISBN 978-0-674-01693-4
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> AGI
You personally are a General Intelligence; we have Artificial Intelligence. Is GPT-4 a "general" "intelligence"? That depends on the standards for the words "general" and "intelligence". (Someone is probably arguing that anything trained by an evolutionary algorithm isn't necessarily "artificial", not that I know how it was trained, nor even care given I don't use that standard).
- I think the article makes a different case, not the Soviet military was what they feared, but this:
""The Soviet entry into the war played a much greater role than the atomic bombs in inducing Japan to surrender because it dashed any hope that Japan could terminate the war through Moscow's mediation," said Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, whose recently published "Racing the Enemy" examines the conclusion of the Pacific war and is based on recently declassified Soviet archives as well as U.S. and Japanese documents..
"The emperor and the peace party (within the government) hastened to end the war expecting that the Americans would deal with Japan more generously than the Soviets," Hasegawa, a Russian-speaking American scholar, said in an interview.""
So even if the actual effect of the Russian attacks may have been small the fact that a country that seemed neutral to Japan suddenly joined the allies and attacked made a material difference in Japan's perception of the situation, in turn leading to a quicker end of the war than would have been the case otherwise.
