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Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

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During World War II, the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, were destroyed by atomic bombs dropped by the United States military on August 6 and August 9, 1945, respectively. The surrender of Japan followed on August 15.

Prelude to the bombings

The bombs were secretly developed by the United States under the codename "Manhattan Project," were the second and third atomic bombs to be exploded, and are the only ones ever used as weapons, rather than for testing purposes. (The first test explosion had occurred in a desert in New Mexico on July 16, 1945.) The decision to drop the bombs was made by US President Harry S. Truman, and followed over 3½ years of direct involvement of the US in World War II, during which time the United States had suffered over a million casualties. Truman's officially stated intention in ordering the bombings was to bring about a quick resolution of the war by inflicting destruction, and instilling fear of further destruction, that was sufficient to cause Japan to surrender. As detailed near the end of this article, whether or not the bombings were justified has long been a contentious issue.

Hiroshima

Hiroshima during World War II

At the time of its bombing, Hiroshima was a city of relatively minor military significance. It contained the 2nd General Army Headquarters, which commanded the defense of all of southern Japan. The city was a communications center, a storage point, and an assembly area for troops, but it was not considered important enough by the U.S. to be targeted for significant bombing prior to August 1945.

The center of the city contained a number of reinforced concrete buildings as well as lighter structures. Outside the center, the area was congested by a dense collection of small wooden workshops set among Japanese houses; a few larger industrial plants lay near the outskirts of the city. The houses were of wooden construction with tile roofs. Many of the industrial buildings also were of wood frame construction. The city as a whole was highly susceptible to fire damage.

The population of Hiroshima had reached a peak of over 380,000 earlier in the war but prior to the atomic bombing the population had steadily decreased because of a systematic evacuation ordered by the Japanese government. At the time of the attack the population was approximately 255,000. This figure is based on the registered population, used by the Japanese in computing ration quantities, and the estimates of additional workers and troops who were brought into the city may not be highly accurate.

The bombing

Hiroshima was the primary target of the first U.S. nuclear attack mission, onAugust 6, 1945. The weather was good, and the crew and equipment functioned properly. In every detail, the attack was carried out exactly as planned, and the bomb, with a 60 kg core of uranium-235, performed precisely as expected.


About an hour before the bombing, the Japanese early warning radar net had detected the approach of some American aircraft headed for the southern part of Japan. The alert had been given and radio broadcasting stopped in many cities, among them Hiroshima. The planes approached the coast at a very high altitude. At nearly 08:00, the radar operator in Hiroshima determined that the number of planes coming in was very small—probably not more than three—and the air raid alert was lifted. The normal radio broadcast warning was given to the people that it might be advisable to go to shelter if B-29s were actually sighted, but no raid was expected beyond some sort of reconnaissance. At 08:16., the B-29 Enola Gay dropped the nuclear bomb called "Little Boy" over the central part of the city and it exploded with a blast equivalent to 12 thousand tons of TNT, killing an estimated 80,000 civilians outright.

Japanese realization of the bombing

The aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing

The Tokyo control operator of the Japanese Broadcasting Corporation noticed that the Hiroshima station had gone off the air. He tried to use another telephone line to reestablish his program, but it too had failed. About twenty minutes later the Tokyo railroad telegraph center realized that the main line telegraph had stopped working just north of Hiroshima. From some small railway stops within ten miles (16 km) of the city came unofficial and confused reports of a terrible explosion in Hiroshima. All these reports were transmitted to the Headquarters of the Japanese General Staff.

Military headquarters repeatedly tried to call the Army Control Station in Hiroshima. The complete silence from that city puzzled the men at Headquarters; they knew that no large enemy raid could have occurred, and they knew that no sizeable store of explosives was in Hiroshima at that time. A young officer of the Japanese General Staff was instructed to fly immediately to Hiroshima, to land, survey the damage, and return to Tokyo with reliable information for the staff. It was generally felt at Headquarters that nothing serious had taken place, that it was all a terrible rumor starting from a few sparks of truth.

The staff officer went to the airport and took off for the southwest. After flying for about three hours, while still nearly 100 miles (160 km) from Hiroshima, he and his pilot saw a great cloud of smoke from the bomb. In the bright afternoon, the remains of Hiroshima were burning.

Their plane soon reached the city, around which they circled in disbelief. A great scar on the land, still burning, and covered by a heavy cloud of smoke, was all that was left of a great city. They landed south of the city, and the staff officer immediately began to organize relief measures, after reporting to Tokyo.

Tokyo's first knowledge of what had really caused the disaster came from the White House public announcement in Washington, sixteen hours after the nuclear attack on Hiroshima. By the end of 1945, it is estimated that 60,000 more people died due to nuclear fallout sickness, bringing the total killed in Hiroshima in 1945 to 140,000. Since then several thousand more people have died of radiation-related causes.[1] (According to the city of Hiroshima, as of August 6, 2004, the cumulative death toll associated with the effects of the bombing was 237,062. [2] There are about 270,000 hibakusha, "atom-bomb survivors", still living in Japan.)

"Survival" of some structures

Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall, the closest building to have withstood the bomb blast.

Some of the reinforced concrete buildings in Hiroshima were of a far stronger construction than is required by normal standards in America, because of the earthquake danger in Japan. This exceptionally strong construction undoubtedly accounted for the fact that the framework of some of the buildings that were fairly close to the center of damage in the city did not collapse. Another is that the blast was more downward than sideways; this has much to do with the "survival" of the Prefectural Industrial Promotional Hall (pictured), which was only a few metres from the aiming point. (The ruin was named Hiroshima Peace Memorial and made a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1996 over the objections of the US and China.[3])

Nagasaki

Nagasaki during World War II

The city of Nagasaki had been one of the largest sea ports in southern Japan and was of great war-time importance because of its many and varied industries, including the production of ordnance, ships, military equipment, and other war materials. The narrow long strip attacked was of particular importance because of its industries.

In contrast to many modern aspects of Nagasaki, the residences almost without exception were of flimsy, typical Japanese construction, consisting of wood or wood-frame buildings, with wood walls with or without plaster, and tile roofs. Many of the smaller industries and business establishments were also housed in wooden buildings or flimsily built masonry buildings. Nagasaki had been permitted to grow for many years without conforming to any definite city zoning plan and therefore residences were constructed adjacent to factory buildings and to each other almost as close as it was possible to build them throughout the entire industrial valley.

Nagasaki had never been subjected to large scale bombing prior to the explosion of a nuclear weapon there. On August 1, 1945, however, a number of high explosive bombs were dropped on the city. A few of these bombs hit in the shipyards and dock areas in the southwest portion of the city. Several of the bombs hit the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works and six bombs landed at the Nagasaki Medical School and Hospital, with three direct hits on buildings there. While the damage from these few bombs were relatively small, it created considerable concern in Nagasaki and a number of people, principally school children, were evacuated to rural areas for safety, thus reducing the population in the city at the time of the nuclear attack.

The bombing

Mushroom cloud from the nuclear explosion over Nagasaki rising 18 km (60,000 ft) into the air.

On the morning of August 9, 1945, the crew of the American B-29 Superfortress, "Bock's Car," flown by Major Charles W. Sweeney and carrying the nuclear bomb nicknamed, "Fat Man," found their primary target, Kokura, to be obscured by cloud. After three runs over the city and having fuel running low due to a fuel-transfer problem, they headed for their secondary target, Nagasaki. At about 07:50 Japanese time, an air raid alert was sounded in Nagasaki, but the "all clear" signal was given at 08:30. When only two B-29 superfortresses were sighted at 10:53 the Japanese apparently assumed that the planes were only on reconnaissance and no further alarm was given. A few minutes later, at 11:00, the observation B-29 ("The Great Artiste" flown by Capt. Frederick C. Bock) dropped instruments attached to three parachutes.

At 11:02, a last minute break in the clouds over Nagasaki allowed Bockscar's bombardier, Capt. Kermit Beahan, to visually sight the target as ordered. The weapon, containing a core of 8 kg of plutonium-239, was dropped over the city's industrial valley. It exploded 1,540 feet (469 m) above the ground almost midway between the Mitsubishi Steel and Arms Works, in the south, and the Mitsubishi-Urakami Ordnance Works (Torpedo Works), in the north, the two principal targets of the city. Some 75,000 of Nagasaki's 240,000 residents were killed, followed by the death of at least as many from resulting sickness and injury. However another report issues a different residential number, speaking of Nagasaki's population which dropped in one split-second from 422,000 to 383,000, thus 39,000 were killed, over 25,000 were injured. If taken into account those who died from radioactive materials causing cancer, the total number of residents killed is believed to be at least 100,000.

Debate over the decision to drop the bombs

Even before the event, the dropping of atomic bombs on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was controversial.

Opposition to use of atomic bombs

  • The Manhattan Project had originally been conceived as a counter to Nazi Germany's atomic bomb program, and with the defeat of Germany, several scientists working on the project felt that the United States should not be the first to use such weapons. One of the prominent critics of the bombings was Albert Einstein. Leo Szilard, a scientist who played a major role in the development of the atomic bomb, argued "If the Germans had dropped atomic bombs on cities instead of us, we would have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them."
  • Their use has been called barbaric since, besides destroying a military base and a military industrial center, several hundreds of thousands civilians were killed. Others argue that the Japanese industrial heart, operated mostly by civilians, shared as much culpability as Japanese Army regulars.
  • Some have claimed that the Japanese were already essentially defeated, and therefore use of the bombs was unnecessary. General Dwight D. Eisenhower so advised the Secretary of War, Henry L. Stimson, in July of 1945. [4] The highest-ranking officer in the Pacific Theater, General Douglas MacArthur, was not consulted beforehand, but said afterward that there was no military justification for the bombings. The same opinion was expressed by Fleet Admiral William Leahy (the Chief of Staff to the President), General Carl Spaatz (commander of the U.S. Strategic Air Forces in the Pacific), and Brigadier General Carter Clarke (the military intelligence officer who prepared intercepted Japanese cables for U.S. officials) (all also from [5]); Major General Curtis LeMay ([6]); and Admiral Ernest King, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, and Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet (both from [7]).
  • Others contend that Japan had been trying to surrender for at least two months, but the US refused by insisting on an unconditional surrender—which they did not get even after the bombing, the bone of contention being retention of the Emperor.[8] In fact, while several diplomats favored surrender, the leaders of the Japanese military were committed to fighting a 'Decisive Battle' on Kyushu, hoping that they could negotiate better terms for an armistice afterward—all of which the Americans knew from reading decrypted Japanese communications. The Japanese government never did decide what terms, beyond preservation of an imperial system, they would have accepted to end the war; as late as August 9, the Supreme Council was still split, with the hardliners insisting Japan should demobilize its own forces, no war crimes trials, and no occupation. Only the direct intervention of the Emperor ended the dispute, and even after that there was a serious risk of a military coup.
  • Some have argued that the Soviet Union's switch from friendly neutral to enemy might have been enough to convince the Japanese military of the need to accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration (plus some provision for the emperor). In the event, the decision to surrender was made before the scale of the Soviet attack on Manchuria, Sakhalin Island, and the Kuril Islands was known, but had the war continued, the Soviets would have been able to invade Hokkaido well before the Allied invasion of Kyushu.
  • Many critics believe that the U.S. had ulterior motives in dropping the bombs, including justifying the $2 billion investment in the Manhattan Project, testing the effects of nuclear weapons, exacting revenge for the attacks on Pearl Harbor, and demonstrating U.S. capabilities to the Soviet Union.
  • It has been argued that, under the Nuremberg Principles and the Hague Convention, then in force, the use of atomic weapons against civilian populations on a large scale is a crime against humanity and a war crime. Wilful killing of civilians, wanton destruction of cities, and use of poisonous weapons (due to the effects of the radiation) were defined as war crimes by international law of the time, which counters the argument that conventional bombings of civilians also cost many lifes. Some people consider the bombings the largest acts of terrorism in history. One officer of the International Court of Justice has stated: "Nuclear weapons can be expected—in the present state of scientific development at least—to cause indiscriminate victims among combatants and non-combatants alike, as well as unnecessary suffering among both categories… Until scientists are able to develop a 'clean' nuclear weapon which would distinguish between combatants and non-combatants, nuclear weapons will clearly have indiscriminate effects and constitute an absolute challenge to humanitarian law." [9]
  • The decision to bomb Nagasaki only a few days after Hiroshima raises separate issues. In his semi-autobiographical novel Timequake, Kurt Vonnegut said that while the Hiroshima bomb may have saved the lives of his friends in the U.S. armed forces, Nagasaki still proved that the United States was capable of senseless cruelty.

Support for use of atomic bombs

Supporters of the bombing concede that although the civilian leadership in Japan was cautiously and discreetly sending out diplomatic communiqués as far back as January of 1945, following the Allied invasion of Luzon in the Philippines, Japanese military officials were unanimously opposed to any negotiations before the use of the Atomic bomb.

While Prime Minister Zenko Suzuki did use covert diplomatic channels to begin negotiation for peace, the civilian leadership could not negotiate surrender or even a cease-fire on its own. Japan, as a Constitutional Monarchy, could only enter into a peace agreement with the unanimous support of the Japanese cabinet, and this cabinet was dominated by militarists from the Japanese Imperial Army and the Japanese Imperial Army, all of whom were initially opposed to any peace deal. A political stalemate developed between the military and civilian leaders of Japan with the military increasingly determined to fight despite the costs and odds.

Historian Victor Davis Hanson points to the increased Japanese resistance, futile as it was in retrospect, as the war came to its inevitable conclusion. The battle of Battle of Okinawa showed this determination to fight on at all costs. Nearly 200,000 Japanese were killed in the most bloody battle of the Pacific theater, just 8 weeks before Japan’s final surrender. When the Soviet Union declared war on Japan on August 8 1945, the Japanese Imperial Army ordered its ill supplied and weakened forces in Manchuria to fight to the last man, and order which it carried out. Major General Masakazu Amanu, chief of the operations section at Japanese Imperial Headquarters, stated that he was absolutely convinced his defensive preparations, begun in early 1944, could repel any Allied invasion of the home islands with minimum looses.

After the realization that the destruction of Hiroshima was from a nuclear weapon, the civilian leadership gained more and more traction in its argument that Japan had to concede defeat and accept the terms of the Yalta Proclamation.

According to some Japanese historians, Japanese civilian leaders who favored surrender saw their salvation in the atomic bombing. The Japanese military was steadfastly refusing to give up, so the peace faction seized on the bombing as a new argument to force surrender. Koichi Kido, one of emperor Hirohito's closest advisors stated that "We of the peace party were assisted by the atomic bomb in our endeavor to end the war". Hisatsune Sakomizu the chief Cabinet secretary in 1945 called the bombing "a golden opportunity given by heaven for Japan to end the war". According to these historians and others the pro-peace civilian leadership was able to use the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagisaki to convince the military that no amount of courage, skill and fearless combat could help Japan against the power atomic weapons. Akio Morita, founder of Sony and Japanese Naval officer during the war, also concludes that it was the Atomic bomb and not conventional bombings from B-29’s that convinced the Japanese military to agree to peace.

Supporters of the bombing also argue that waiting for the Japanese to surrender was not a cost-free option. The conventional bombardment and blockade were killing tens of thousands each week in Japan, directly and indirectly, and the US Navy's 'Operation Starvation' was aptly named. Also, as a result of the war, noncombatants were dieing throughout Asia at a rate of ~200,000 per month. Supporters of the bombing claim that General Tojo, before his resignation as premier in July of 1944, had ordered all Allied POW's, numbering over 100,000, to be executed at the first sign of an invasion of the Japanese mainland.

See also

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