True Facts: The Consequences Of Nuclear War Were Largely Unknown When It Happened

Japan wasn’t making earnest attempts at a reasonable surrender. It was hoping it could get a conditional surrender where it would be able to preserve at least some of its empire (the hyper focus on them supposedly merely wanting assurances they could keep their Emperor is really downplaying what they hoped to negotiate). It was still occupying large portions of East Asia by late 1945. That was simply unacceptable to the Allies, and very understandably so. Russia wouldn’t tolerate a conditional surrender either, and all of Japan’s hopes at such a negotiation were done via a Moscow that it turned out was just leading Japan on while assembling an invasion.

“There is a school of thought, and I don’t know how well accepted it is now, that the reason we dropped the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August despite Japan suing for peace through non-US diplomatic channels since IIRC April 1945 is we wanted to put the Soviets on the back foot by showing how far we had gotten with our nuclear program.”

There’s just no compelling historical evidence for this claim. The paragraph following it contains the actual explanation, and in fact is hard to square with any claims that it was a demonstration for the Soviets. It’s hard to square on the one hand the idea that mass casualties had been normalized, while also implying that the nukes were viewed as a uniquely horrible thing and everyone wanted to avoid personal responsibility while also sending a warning on the other.

The nukes were developed and deployed as an extension of the conventional strategic bombing program. Strategic bombing was the ultimate military fetish of the era. The Manhattan Project wasn’t the most expensive weapons project of the war: the B-29 bomber was, costing at least a third more. The Norden bombsight cost another 2/3 of the total budget for the nuclear bomb, only it never worked well, necessitating the use of mass bombing raids. Nukes were developed and deployed as a way to effect the same level of destruction with far fewer planes and bombs.

You could interpret the eschewing of responsibility as all the players knowing the horror they were unleashing and trying to avoid accountability, but another interpretation is that no one viewed the nuclear bomb as anything other than an especially powerful explosive, so it wasn’t something where anyone agonized over the first deployments. There’s a lot of evidence that the military was very slow to appreciate the uniquely dangerous aspects of nuclear weapons even after Hiroshima, as evidenced by the cavalier attitude towards testing right through the 1950s. When the military talked about how a single atomic bomb was as powerful as X amount of TNT, that’s genuinely how they were viewing and using them: as an easier way to get X amount of high explosive on target.

Hiroshima and Nagasaki (which was a backup target; Kokura was the original objective) were targeted because they were significant military targets that would have been bombed sooner or later anyway as part of the preliminary phase for the invasion of Japan (and contrary to revisionism that invasion was very much in the planning. In fact Japan was counting on it and hoping to bleed it dry on the beaches in order to force the US to agree to a conditional surrender).

Personally, I view the nukes as war crimes, but as sub-components of the overarching war crime that was strategic bombing in general. Ultimately there was a rationale that went into the development of the strategic bombing concept that stretched back to the interwar years. It turned out to be massively, horrifically wrong, but there was a coherent thought process to it.