Sherman's March to the Sea can be understood as a scorched earth policy.

Wiping cities off the map with nukes (or carpet bombing or firebombing them to ashes) takes mass murder of civilians to another level. It's not simply a scorched earth policy.

The U. S. nuked major population centers because they only had two nukes at the time. They could have tried an offshore demonstration of force, but for geopolitical reasons felt like they didn't want to wait. The Soviets had captured Manchuria and Korea at lightening speed. That's no reason to commit war crimes on Japanese civilians.

Also, the allies could have actually negotiated surrender terms. Imperial Japan wasn't Nazi Germany. They didn't have to demand unconditional surrender. Hell, they ended up leaving the Imperial Household alone anyway, and that was the only Japanese demand by the time of the bombings.

Couldn't have said it better

I think with regard to negotiating surrender terms, it has to be kept in mind that the Japanese military was highly autonomous and not subordinate to the government - there was an attempted coup to prevent Hirohito's announcement of surrender as it was, so I don't think it's necessarily the case that negotiations ends the war much quicker than in reality.

If we shift back to the original topic, I think it's an important to keep in mind that there is a difference between what is best for Russia and what is best for Putin.

I'm sure it has not escaped the notice of Putin (or any other dictator), that Muammar Gaddhafi gave up his nuclear weapons and ended up being anally violated to death with bayonets, and meanwhile Kim Jong Un kept his and lives like a god to this day.

For Putin, if the most likely outcome if he loses power is death. Just look at the historical track record of dictators who have been overthrown - they tend not to have long life expectancies. And as a person who is fundamentally self serving, there is not a lot of difference for him between him dying and everyone dying.

I do worry about the situation quite a lot. From an ethical perspective, Ukraine is unambiguously in the right and Putin is in the wrong, and so Ukraine's triumphs should be celebrated. But I also think that realistically, the more Putin feels like he is backed into a corner, the more dangerous the situation becomes. And I do at times think that maybe the right outcome here is for Ukraine to press the advantage as much as it can in the next few months, before Russia's conscripts take the field and before the west runs out of weapons to send to them, and then negotiate peace from a position of strength. But in the end the worry is that as uncomfortable as it is, Putin needs to be able to save face and hold on to power in a peace settlement, or else he will escalate.

I think the discourse around the use of nuclear weapons in Japan in WW2 is in some ways a bit unfair. It's so easy to look back with the benefit of hindsight and judge the decisions that past people made, without appreciating the information that they were operating on and the context of the time. I think as a student of history, you often find that historical person were smarter and more reasonable than they are given credit for, given the information and incentives that they were operating on.

When we talk about a negotiated settlement, it is important to consider the context. World War 2 started in part because the negotiated settlement of World War 1 allowed the Nazis (and to a lesser extent, Japan) to sell the message that the military had not been defeated and were instead stabbed in the back during political negotiations. Japan was saying that they only wanted the imperial household to retain control, but it is hard to imagine them accepting the loss of Korea, Taiwan and Manchuria - let alone the pacifist constitution that was imposed on them. But even with the benefit of hindsight, it is not hard to imagine that anything less than an obvious and total defeat of the Japanese military would have led to a third world war as soon as the US was distracted by the USSR and Japan developed its own bomb. If Communist China could do it by 1964, Japan could have done it much more quickly.

But more broadly, from US' perspective, the reality is that the US didn't know whether Japan would accept an unconditional surrender or not without the use of the bomb. They didn't know if Japan would surrender or not even after the bombs had been dropped.

Modern observers also need to consider the context of the bloodiest war ever fought. The harsh calculus is that 50M people had already died and every week hundreds of thousands of people in China were dying between the Guangxi campaign and the invasion of Manchuria, thousands were dying in the firebombings in Japan, and on top of that the US faced the prospect on an invasion of the home islands in which millions would die.

In that context, dropping two bombs in which only tens of thousands of people would die must have seemed like a clean ending to the war. In the end, the atomic bombs killed 150,000 people. You should also remember that Hiroshima was not a major population center, and neither was Kokura - the original target of the Fat Man bomb. The plan was to solely target military targets as both a show of force, to ease a potential land invasion, and to avoid using weapons of mass destruction against population centers. Nagasaki became a target only because Kokura was under cloud cover and the pilot made the field decision to either bomb a secondary target or risk being shot down and losing the bomb.


I think if any of us had been in the same position, it is hard to argue that we would have chosen differently, and it is harder still to argue that choosing differently was clearly the right choice. And if that's the case, it hardly seems fair to judge people in the past for making that choice.

I'm pretty drunk so please take the above with a grain of salt

@JECE....

scorched earth policy: Many people who die in war are civilians who die from starvation and disease. It is precisely scorched earth policies that kill people. Tamerlane did not kill 5% of the population of the planet by slaughtering soldiers in battles. He did so through a "scorched earth policy" that left millions of people to starve.

atomic demonstration: Let me repeat that the Japanese leadership met, had a thorough discussion and explicitly decided to not surrender after the first atomic bomb was dropped on one of the second tier cities of their home islands.

@Deezee....Imagine that one is a Russian, who genuinely loves his country and loathes Putin. Putin's strategic (and even tactical blunder) has placed Russia as a nation is a horrible position. But even if one were to murder Putin tomorrow in the most public and gruesome manner imaginable, what would that change?

Russia's positions as a high table great power via Western acquiescence is over. Defeat in Ukraine or even a diplomatically negotiated disengagement will mean the national humiliation of Russia and the obliterations of its pretentions to greatness and being able to self-imagine itself as a peer of the USA or even Germany.

A rational, Putin-hating Russian patriot would never have chosen to invade Ukraine but finds himself inexorably committed. My fear is not Putin's idiosyncratic psychoses but the dynamic game faced by any potential alternative. Putin likely faces a "victory or death" scenario, but Russia largely does as well. The West is not going to voluntarily indulge Russian pretensions of greatness going forward under any circumstances. The utter humiliation of a proud people and arguably a great civilization seems (to me) the unavoidable consequence of retreat in Ukraine.

Additionally, I was in college during the bombing campaign against Serbia in 1999. I remember our undergraduate dorm room conversations drawing a direct parallel between Kosovo for Serbia and Ukraine for Russia. (It was unsaid at the time but one could make add in the West Bank for Israel) This is the original homeland where all of the foundational history actually happened and where the "holy sites" of the entire national mythology are located. At least among American undergraduates in an Ivy League dorm, it was accepted without debate that Russia would fight to prevent Ukraine from being ripped away from them and no one seemed to question the logic or morality of that position. And this was a group who at the same time endorsed that a brutal bombing campaign would be needed to force Serbia to bow down to the international order and that their behavior demanded such action.

For people who are unaware, commodities futures markets are predicting fuel shortages in Europe for the next 5 winters. Plus, take a look at Libya a decade after Muammar's demise. The world really cannot live without Russia if they fall into internal anarchy for even a few years in line with the last Russian Civil War. While they produce ~10% if the worlds oil, they produce more than 20% of the world's battery grade nickel. My primary concern is fertilizer production, both nitrogen-based synthetic fertilizer production capacity and the potassium-based potash fertilizers that have to be mined. As bad as things are with Russian and Ukrainian grain off of the market, domestic production of grains vastly exceeds imports even in the danger countries of Africa. Drops in local crop yields from fertilizer shortages would dwarf the reduced trade flows that got attention this summer.

I don't want to read all of that, but I'll give my opinion: Russian nuking of Ukraine would be a monumental line crossing for history, but if we look at it like just another method of warefare the US/NATO wouldn't get involved because they didn't get involved during the ground invasion. It's like the chicken game where two cars are driving full speed at each other and go over a bridge with room for only one car. The logical move for the other driver is to pull over so both drivers hit and kill each other. tldr: in the game of nuclear war the only winning move isn't to just not play it's to destroy all copies of the game.

Putin, Putin, wouldn’t wanna nuke him
Sitting in the corner with his petty fauna
What’s he gonna do?
He’s gonna come for you and you’ll do a poo

Laying in the grave, you better behave.
Because it’s Putin, Putin, the crazy invader
The guy is crazy, he wants land
It’s gonna cost more than a grand

The lives lost are irreplaceable
He is far from graceful
Ukraine is suffering
Putin is bluffing

Chunky Putin wrestles a bear
He wouldn’t dare
But it’s Putin, he doesn’t care.
Putin, Putin, the fat man in the chair.

He picks a fight with the USA
Perhaps he is gay (lack of a better word, I am bi for anyone who gets offended)
Putin Putin, he’s gonna die
Oh no, he’ gonna cry…

Enjoy

A couple more points on the WWII discussion.

Nobody is saying the bombings were good in any way. Moral justification does not mandate that the act be good in a vacuum, instead using the context of the time and a little bit of hindsight we can judge actions on their moral worth in a more utilitarian way.

Bonatogether contrasts civilian deaths as a result of atomic bombings and military deaths as the result of an invasion. It was theorized at the time that the Japanese civilian population would have taken up arms to defend their homeland against the Americans who they literally saw as devils due to propaganda (same goes for how the American public and soldiers saw the Japanese). This was based on the recent campaign in Okinawa, which had a large population of Japanese. Many civilians had been used, willingly or unwillingly, as human shields or suicide bombers.

JECE argued that the Japanese would have been agreeable to a surrender without the atomic bombings or a land invasion of Japan saying, "Imperial Japan wasn't Nazi Germany." This statement is not correct imo. While there are obviously many differences, the leadership groups in both nations were beyond surrender at the end of the war. Only a dramatic event, like a full-scale invasion or two atomic bombings could have done the trick.

As a side note, several people have said that Japan would have been split between Soviet and American control, is this true? Would the Americans have willingly shipped Soviet troops across to Japan? The Soviets surely couldn't have effected such an invasion on their own.

"Only a dramatic event, like a full-scale invasion or two atomic bombings could have done the trick."

Incidentally, there was a full-scale invasion and it may very well have done the trick. Granted, not of the Home Islands, but many historians consider the Soviet invasion of Manchuria and Korea as the real catalyst for Japanese surrender, not the bombings.

The bombings served as a fear tactic. If they wanted to have a lasting affect and to force a surrender they would have nuked the capital and the Emperor with it. There was no reason to choose innocents over the guilty.

And as JECE said, many historians consider the Soviet invasions the real reason for Japanese surrender. Considering what we know of the fear the Nazis had for the Red army, the Japanese would have had the same sentiment.

If you nuke the capital (and the Emperor), then there is no one to surrender to you. A government capable of making decisions was necessary.

Nuking Tokyo would probably have killed even more innocent people.

Tokyo was already leveled

Sure, "many historians" consider the Soviet invasion as more impactful, but just as many don't.

How many days were between the two bombings?

3

That seems... very low

The invasion of Manchuria didn't threaten the home islands in any real capacity, although Korea was almost entirely open to the Soviets at that point in time. From my understanding, the real effect of it was to break the army leadership's morale - it represented the rapid collapse of everything that they had worked for. This seems to me to be a necessary factor for the Japanese surrender to happen, but it's not a sufficient factor - the government needed to accept defeat, etc.

Another factor to consider is that the bombs were truly terrifying to people who had never seen them before - so, the vast majority of the world, and certainly everyone in Japan. The government correctly guessed that the US only had 2 or 3, but they couldn't verify that in the time.

The total shock of the rapid invasion and of the atomic bombing really demonstrated to all top-level factions in the government that the war was truly lost - no limited peace could be made.

With regards to a division of Japan, it seems that one was planned but it fell through for various reasons. Google does not turn up anything very satisfactory regarding it.

If there is no government, and no leader then it is a lot more chance a country will fall apart in their war effort. Japan was losing. Germany was losing. Hitler killed himself. The party fell apart and surrender followed soon after. I don’t follow the logic that the same thing would not have happened in Japan. They would have been lost. Such an impactful character being lost would have been more impactful in my opinion than the genocide of two cities.

What is the worst that could happen? They could continue the war I guess. A new Emperor comes to power and a new government formed. But how likely is this? Just look at it from this point; was there another option? Yes. Was it better? Yes. Most certainly.

Tokyo was bombed. Leaving 100,000 dead. Seems like the Americans just really like mass bombing cities. Take the head off the chicken to kill it rather than just plucking feathers. Sure, it runs around for a bit in panic but eventually gives up. No Emperor means no imperial Japanese leader. Right? This is all theoretical but I have strong belief that the US went about it wrong.

Sounds like the British and French governments before cruise missiling Qaddafi.

He was the image of Nazi Germany and the Emperor was Imperial Japan.

Gopher, would you agree that the most influence in NATO is held by the US?

Do you know why Gadaffi was attacked? It was a stupid reason…