8 Comments

Thank you, both! What a dumb typo. Yes, the heat quickly rises to 10 million degrees Celsius, not 10 billion. I have corrected it in the text.

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Good article. But is the number 10 billion degrees correct? Perhaps million is better?

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Yeah, 10^7 not 10^10 K

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Question - what do you & other historians think about the book "Downfall" by Richard Frank? It makes a pretty compelling case for the argument that the Japanese leadership were not ready to surrender right down to the last minute and that it was a close thing that the gov't didn't collapse (to be taken over even more explicitly by the military) before the actual capitulation.

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Did I miss in the original reading of Hersey's "Hiroshima" that it was fictional? It certainly uses the convention of fiction writing, but I've always understood it to be one of the first examples of narrative non-fiction, especially since the subjects of his reporting are very much real people.

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That is my mistake. I don’t know how that adjective got in there. I will remove it. Hersey interviewed real survivors.

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At the top of everyone's mind in the summer of 1945 was a repeat of Iwo Jima and Okinawa on a much larger scale. (My parents made that very clear.) The Japanese considered these islands to be home islands and defended them as such. Hence the consensus estimates on the cost of invading Japan's main islands and projection that the war would not end until late 1946 or even 1948, at the cost of another million Japanese dead. These were straightforward extrapolations and well-founded.

Hence claims of Cold War considerations in the dropping of the Bomb are anachronistic. (The Cold War didn't get underway until 1947 or 1948, either the Greek civil war or the Berlin blockade -- take your pick. BTW LeMay died in 1990, while LeMay died in 1970. When did these supposed conversations happen?) The US had borne almost the entire burden of the Pacific War and defeating Japan. (The Japanese had effectively won in China and withdrew only because of defeat at home. The Communist victory in 1949 was one result of Japan's abrupt withdrawal, because the Nationalists emerged in 1945 in greatly weakened condition.) There was a strong feeling with Truman and others that the US should demonstrate its independence from Soviet help in the war against Japan, in contrast with the dominant role that the Red Army had played in defeating Germany.

The dropping of the second nuclear bomb on Nagasaki was exceptionally unfortunate -- not that the whole business wasn't awful -- as the commenter wrote. However, without higher intervention, the Bomb simply went into the queue of LeMay's bombing bureaucracy. (And by August 1945, it was a bureaucratic machine.) A third drop was inevitable without overriding political authority. Truman's intervention (a) stopped a third nuclear attack, and (b) established a new treatment of nuclear weapons as different and not "normal." The latter (b) would play a crucial role in the Korean War a few years later.

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And for all the "genius" of these morons, when the total fuckup that was the Nagasaki mission from beginning to end (fuel wouldn't feed in the B-29" from one main tank, reducing available fuel by 1/4), then after several runs over the city when they couldn't drop visually, and were faced by that fuel shortage with either dropping the bomb in the ocean or violating the ROE for use, the bombardier "found" an opening in the clouds (while using the radar system) and instead of bombing the actual target, the Mitsubishi factory, they dropped it on the Urakami Catholic Church, the largest Christian Church in Asia, built by the donations of the parishioners after their religion was legalized in 1880 in the Meiji Restoration. And then they barely made it to Okinawa where they made the wildest landing Jimmy Doolittle ever saw as they ran out of gas on the runway. There's a reason why the Chair Farce doesn't talk very much in their Official Mythology about this mission.

In truth, Nagasaki was the traditional "capital" of anti-imperialism in Japan, and was the last place to bomb if we wanted to "make an impression." Which we didn't. the Supreme War Council didn't mention the bomb that day at all, because their entire attention was focused on the Red Army's attack in Manchuria, where they had no defenses, having moved the best units of the Kwantung Army to Kyushu to face the US invasion, and they knew the Russians would be able to invade Hokkaido in September - where they had no defenses, and take northern Japan as far as Tokyo by October, at least a month before the US invasion. So they surrendered to us because they knew what the Russians would do to them and told us "yassuh, boss, that bomb done did it." Which has allowed the Japanese to market themselves as the world's biggest victim ever since, with no one thinking about the Rape of Nanking, the Thai-Burma Railway, the Bataan Death March or any of their other atrocities.

Of all the stupid, ignorant, malicious, mendacious things this idiot country has ever done, the bombs were the most stupid, most ignorant, most malicious and most mendacious. We have made our foreign policy on a Myth and a Lie ever since, and we wonder why we can't win wars since 1945.

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