I know this is a long read but I thought that it framed quite well the absolute inability for this debate to ever be concluded to everyones perspective.
What Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent to me is the pinnacle of destruction, the crowning achievement, of horror on a scale previously unimaginable that the Second World War was, and is.
The only other horror that surpasses the atomic bombings in sheer horror on the battlefield is the Battle for Berlin where 305,00 Russian combatants and 325,00 German combatants and civilians died. 630,000 human beings for a single city. Was the Battle for Berlin even neccessary? Could it have been avoided?
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http://archive.tri-cityherald.com/BOMB/bomb15.htmlBound by the bomb
Scientists, survivors, veterans debate bomb's morality
Should the atomic bombs have been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Attempts to answer the moral questions raised by the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are rooted in a cold-blooded mathematical equation of war.
The rationale is simple: You kill a lot of people now, hoping to save even more lives later.
An estimated 140,000 people were killed at Hiroshima and another 74,000 at Nagasaki. Would an Allied invasion of Japan have been more bloody?
Many factors cloud any calculation:
The battle for the outlying Japanese island of Okinawa a few months earlier killed at least 12,400 Americans, between 100,000 and 127,000 Japanese soldiers and between 70,000 to 80,000 civilians.
About 3,000 kamikaze suicide plane missions were flown at Okinawa, and only a handful of Japanese soldiers surrendered.
More people were killed in the battle for the small island than the combined toll of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
What would have happened if Kyushu - the westernmost of Japan's four main islands - was invaded in November 1945 as planned?
Or if the Allies went ahead with plans to invade the main island of Honshu in March 1946?
The Allies estimated between 63,000 to 250,000 of their men would be killed or wounded in the battle for Kyushu - depending on which historian provides the figures. Japanese casualties were expected to be much greater.
Many thousands more would have died at Honshu.
The debate raises other questions: Would Japan have surrendered before the invasions of Kyushu and Honshu?
And could the Americans and British intelligently guess how much fight was left in the Japanese leaders and the Japanese people?
Atomic bomb survivors in Nagasaki say morale was low and the people were ready to end the war.
"How could we fight? We had no weapons," said Nagasaki survivor Tsukasa Uchida. "The American military knew Japan was starving. It knew Japan had lost the war. There was no need for the bombs."
Survivor Akiko Sakita said, "There was no possibility for Japan to win the war ..., and despite what the Japanese military leaders said, there was no possibility to fight on, and surely not with bamboo spears."
Survivors - and historians -also argue the bomb was dropped because the United States wanted to make a show of force to the Soviet Union in the opening round of the Cold War. And they contend the United States did not want to let a $2 billion project go unused.
Even some Manhattan Project scientists had doubts about dropping the bomb on a city. Some signed a petition requesting a demonstration explosion in water or on an island near Japan to impress the Japanese leaders.
Glenn Seaborg, one of plutonium's discoverers, signed that petition. "It just seemed like a good possibility that Japan would have surrendered without the loss of lives at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
"We may have been wrong. They may not have surrendered," Seaborg said. "It was not a clearcut matter. You could argue the other side."
But Seaborg said he would sign the petition again today.
U.S. leaders feared a demonstration with a still largely experimental bomb could easily fizzle - and not impress anyone.
"They argued that the sooner we used it on Japan, the sooner we would end the war," Seaborg said.
Japan appeared determined to continue the war in the summer of 1945.
Struggles were waged among Japan's top military and civilian leaders on whether to fight or surrender, but the pro-war military factions dominated.
Despite the internal debate, Japan's leaders publicly presented a united front of defiance to the outside world.
Because the Allies had broken Japan's codes, the men responsible for making the decision to drop the bomb had some clues about the split among Japan's leaders. But debate continues today on how much the Allies knew.
On July 26, 1945, Allied leaders issued the Potsdam Declaration, calling for Japan to surrender or face destruction.
Japanese Premier Kantaro Suzuki described his reaction to the Potsdam Declaration as "to kill it with silence" - the equivalent of saying, "No comment."
But the Japanese military told newspapers July 28 that Suzuki's reaction was to "treat it with silent contempt." And that was the message received by the Allies.
Some Nagasaki survivors like Uchida blame the military for continuing the war until the bombs dropped. He said he felt "rage, anger and fierce fury" at Japanese military leaders "for not surrendering when they knew we had lost the war."
The first atomic bomb fell Aug. 6, 1945, on Hiroshima. Hirohito and the military knew about that city's destruction later that day, but were paralyzed by indecision.
Hirohito did not meet with his supreme war council until about 11 a.m. Aug. 9, within minutes of when the second bomb fell on Nagasaki.
In the first days after the Hiroshima attack, Japan's government tried to keep the awesome destruction a secret from the rest of the nation.
"The Japanese military did not want people to know about the atomic bomb," said Tsuia Etchu, founder of Nagasaki's Atomic Bomb museum. Etchu was an army officer in the city of Fukuoka when the bomb fell.
Vague newspaper accounts were published Aug. 8, describing a new bomb inflicting "considerable" damage on Hiroshima. Nagasaki Prefecture's governor learned about the true extent of Hiroshima's devastation Aug. 8 from an eyewitness.
Uchida criticizes the speed of the second bombing. "Three days was not enough time to make the decision to surrender."
But after Hiroshima, the United States wanted to hit Japan with a second bomb quickly to create the illusion it had many atomic bombs ready, instead of just two.
On the afternoon of Aug. 9, after learning of Nagasaki's destruction, Japan's supreme war council remained split 3-3 on surrendering.
That evening, Hirohito persuaded the die-hards on the council to accept surrender.
"If the bomb was not dropped on Nagasaki, the military would have continued the war," Etchu said. "I think dropping the atomic bomb shortened the war."
Such opinions are split along very human lines.
Japanese survivors who witnessed the horror believe the bomb was unnecessary. U.S. servicemen who faced the bloody consequences of an invasion see the bomb as their salvation.
Fifty years ago in the Tri-Cities, news of the blast brought jubilation.
Larry Forby - a Hanford firefighter in 1945 - remembers riding a Hanford shuttle bus the night the announcement was made.
"Everyone was so happy. ... There was no one who was not touched by the war with either friends or family in the military," he said.
"I don't think there was a single person on the project who was not elated because this would stop the war."
Charles Sweeney - the pilot of the plane that dropped the Nagasaki bomb - expresses no regrets.
"It was certainly evident that they would not have surrendered. I personally think the president would've been derelict in his duty if it hadn't been used. ... The Japanese had the power to stop the war. We didn't have that power. I'm sure we saved a lot of Japanese lives, too."
