I agree. I had read and occasionally seen a documentary on the A-bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I lived in Tokyo for a while and visited Hiroshima and the A-bomb museum. They had a "scaled" model of the entire city and the bomb hanging on the model with the proportional distance at the height it exploded (represented with red ball - size of billiards ball )
That picture/model is ingrained in my memory - it gave me an instant visual of the scale of horror. Pictures/movies don't come close to describing it. If you can go to the A-bomb museum in Hiroshima - do it.
I have not visited Hiroshima, or Japan at all for that matter, but I just recently came back from visiting the beaches of Normandy, the American cemetery, Arromanches, and other war memorials around there.
While obviously not the same thing, I recognize what you say about the scale of horror – it really is unfathomable from pictures, movies, and other representations. You simply have to visit to get a feel for just how big some of these key events of the war actually were, and it's absolutely mind boggling and horrific.
What really got me about visiting Normandy though was how real it all suddenly became. I'd like to think I'm a fairly well educated person when it comes to modern history, and particularly in terms of WW2. But since I grew up in a country that wasn't really pulled into it, everything just seemed so distant (even though it physically wasn't, I'm from Sweden) and in many ways unreal. That all changed with Normandy, and it was a very strange and mixed set of quite strong emotions involved. I can only imagine what it's like to visit Hiroshima, and hope I some day get the chance to do so.
I could recommend another, shorter trip, if you can spare a few days: get a Russian visa and drive to Haparanda - Kuhmo - Kostamuksha - Belomorsk. Nowadays, it's a one-day drive.
Look at Stalin's Canal there, and imagine that when it was built, the wasted humans were many enough to lay along the canal, buried there head to toe, to form a chain as long as the man-built parts of the canal itself.
The canal was never economically or militarily useful, it was just a project used to get rid of people.
Not quite as many people killed as in Hiroshima, but they were each one separately and individually starved, beaten or shot to death instead of being killed remotely by one big industrial bomb. The killing machinery was human and it worked slow and it worked eye to eye.
From Belomorsk you can take a boat trip to Solovetsk, which was the original development lab for how to starve people in concentration camps. Both Soviets and Nazis studied and developed their methods based on the findings there.
Notice also that you won't see memorials for those who were killed. The miserable swamps are their monument.
I have been to both and I actually liked the one in Nagasaki much better, it puts it in a proper perspective - Nagasaki was a military harbor. Hiroshima museum is more emotional "look at all the suffering". Plus Nagasaki is a much nicer town in a valley, with the Portuguese colonial houses and much less tourists
The Nagasaki History Museum is also very well done, and particularly interesting from a Westerner's point of view. For centuries it was the only city where Europeans were allowed to trade with Japan.
If anything I'd say it's a cliché. There are a lot of bad things that have happened in the world that are ignored by euro centric thinking. This is not one of them.
Because it's a good 800 km from Tokyo, and 4 hours one-way even by bullet train. And because, A-bomb sites and Miyajima aside, there's not all that much of interest in the city of nearby.
On the other side of the coin, I also find it a bit odd to describe Hiroshima as a cliché. Quite the opposite, it's near-unique: Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the only cities ever attacked with nuclear bombs, and you can't get the experience of visiting them anywhere else.
Just as a reminder for people interested in buying JR pass:
1) not all trains all included (fastest Shinkansen Nozomi is not for example)
2) can't be bought in Japan
3) valid for 7/14/21 days from the first use
I went to Japan for 2 weeks and didn't go. I went for the food, the onsen, the city life, nature etc. I wasn't interested enough in their role in WWII to make the trip all the way down to the southern tip.
I think if I had 4 more weeks in Japan I probably still wouldn't go. I'm much more interested in say exploring Hokkaido & The Japanese Alps than going to war museums.
As nuclear weapons get larger the radius at which the fire and concussion is deadly grows faster than the radius at which their radiation is deadly. For relatively small bombs a lot of the deaths from the initial explosion are going to be from radiation and the two bombs dropped on Japan were small compared to the ones standing by in the cold war.
Of course, unlike the bombs dropped on Japan modern thermonuclear weapons burn large amount of U328 with the fast neutrons created from fusion, resulting in large amounts of fallout. They may not cause many radiation deaths from their explosion but the fallout they create will endanger people downwind for a long time after the initial explosion.
I don't have words to convey how much I hope we never see those weapons used in anger.
Of course, unlike the bombs dropped on Japan modern thermonuclear weapons burn large amount of U328 with the fast neutrons created from fusion, resulting in large amounts of fallout. They may not cause many radiation deaths from their explosion but the fallout they create will endanger people downwind for a long time after the initial explosion.
That depends, some use U-238 for this purpose to about double the yield, some don't, like the 50 Mt Tsar Bomba in its one test: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tsar_Bomba
I don't have words to convey how much I hope we never see those weapons used in anger.
Nothing that I know about human nature suggests that they'll again never be used in anger, it's only a question of when. Hopefully not any time soon.
The replaced the U-238 in the Tsar Bomba test with lead when they tested it at the cost of halving its power, you're right. But sadly I've never heard of that being done with a deployed thermonuclear weapon.
When reading on the web, I usually hit ctrl-A (highlight all) to change the contrast of a website's text. Not usually a problem.
On this website, on Chrome, doing this causes it to immediately unhighlight everything, and then eternally highlight-unhighlight-highlight-unhighlight at random intervals. I've never seen quite such bizarre behavior. Works on FF though.
I'm not sure why you are getting downvoted. I can reproduce this behaviour in Chrome. I don't have the best eyes and occasionally use the same trick to increase legibility.
The myriad subtle ways in which designers of "rich websites" break accessibility can be quite frustrating. And most of it is completely unnecessary - the article would still be an amzing read if it were a classic article with standard scroll behavior.
Comments about website formatting are a pestilence, and off-topic for HN. Because the topic of web design is both subjective and very accessible, even to people who have barely skimmed the article, they tend to spawn large, distracting subthreads --- sometimes those subthreads even end up at the tops of threads.
Petitioning site owners to change their design via HN threads almost never works, but (ironically) is virtually guaranteed to degrade the HN thread itself. So, just don't.
They also had over 350,000 civilians, and over 80% of the casualties of the bombing were civilians. You're more than welcome to argue that the bombing was justified, but please don't act like the issue isn't open to debate.
If the atomic bombing targets were chosen purely based on military objectives, why did the U.S. Secretary for War decide at the last minute to save the city where he had been on his honeymoon [1]?
Nagasaki wasn't even a target just weeks before its destruction. The two cities were chosen more or less arbitrarily.
yes, the torpedo factories are a valid target. How large were those, how many square meters of the final destruction was a military target? A city with families and children is not a valid target. If Truman gave a warning to the civilians beforehand most of them could have been saved and they could have still destroyed the factories ...
According to the geneva conventions it is a war crime (not arguing about how reasonable the conventions are etc.).
Yeah, the "They had torpedo factories there" argument is a little silly from an argument standpoint. The intent of the atomic bombs was to show that Japan's strategy of "Make the cost of invasion too high to stomach" was becoming less and less viable.
They showed this intent by indiscriminately slaughtering civilians and military personnel.
Personally, I'm okay with it, mostly because the alternative was invasion, which would have caused a million American casualties and wiped Japan off the face of the map. That would have been unpleasant.
Didn't the Air Force drop millions of leaflets on these cities (and others) urging their evacuation? Didn't Truman warn of Japan's "prompt and utter destruction" less than two weeks before the bomb? I mean, maybe the Japanese though that Truman was blowing smoke, but "utter destruction" is pretty unambiguous.
By the way if you want a semi-scholarly but not entirely dry treatment of the moral problem of Truman's bombs I can recommend the book "Prompt and Utter Destruction".
They did drop generic leaflets warning of generic (conventional) bombing on many cities. They did not specifically warn Hiroshima of any specific attack, or make any specific warning about the atomic bomb.
Given that the atomic bomb was secret, "prompt and utter destruction" is only a warning in retrospect. There is no way that you can read the Potsdam declaration and think, "oh, they are going to start dropping atomic bombs on cities soon," if you don't know what an atomic bomb is or that they exist.
I wonder how important "warning" really is though if it is this vague. Imagine country A is at war with country B. Country A issues an announcement: "if country B does not do what we want, we will set off a bomb in one of country B's major cities." If they follow through with it, does this sort of warning absolve them of responsibility? Does the presence or absence of this kind of vague warning have any effect either way on the ethical calculus regarding the targeting of civilians?
It seems to me that if it is ethical then it is ethical without the warning, and if it is not ethical then it is not ethical with the warning. Which makes the warning question a red herring.
The firebombing of Tokyo (one of many examples - many Japanese cities suffered mass destruction in conventional bombings) was just as, if not more, horrific than Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Why would the residents care whether they were being firebombed or nuclear bombed?
One can accept that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were legitimate military targets while questioning whether the scale and nature of the attacks were morally justifiable, or ultimately necessary.
>The destruction of your enemy in war with the goal of ending the war and saving the lives of your countrymen and allies is always justified.
The ends can't always justify the means - that rationale can easily be twisted to allow anything.
The US wanted to use nuclear weapons in the Vietnam War as well. Had this happened, the use of nuclear weapons in combat would probably have been normalized, and the Cold War would probably not have remained cold for very long.
As far as the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki are concerned, I'm not going to second guess what the American or Japanese forces considered to be in their best interests. In hindsight, we know more than they knew back then about the larger political picture and the effects of radioactive fallout.
Given the possibility of years of grueling island-hopping invasion against an enemy as ardently defiant as Japan, I can see the brutal calculus that simply breaking Japan's will and forcing its surrender quickly through a demonstration of overwhelming destructive power would save more lives in the long run.
But even that doesn't make it good that the US dropped the atomic bombs. It was possibly just an evil act which may have prevented a greater evil.
