A fair question to ask Obama?

Maybe not, but Obama is erudite enough to provide an eloquent answer.

Yeah, it’s fair. It’s also the hardest question in the world maybe to answer. Luckily, he probably did a good job of walking a middle road between yes and no.

I took a class in college all about the atomic age and whatnot. I learned that we (US SAC) specifically left Nagasaki and Hiroshima less damaged (we had firebombed almost every major city in Japan) so we could have a place to test the atomic bomb. Looking back, you can make the argument that it ended the war sooner (fighting in the pacific theater had a potential to drag on in some people’s opinions) but we definitely did not NEED to drop the bomb. We elected to.

Maybe someone should ask if it was the “right decision” to bomb a bunch of people on a Sunday morning with no warning…

as a politician he probably tip toed around the question and masterfully avoided to answer it by injecting lots of unrelated information

How can a question be unfair? We have yet to answer to the world community for Curtis le May’s bloodthirsty decision to warn Stalin by incinerating hundreds of thousands of human beings.

aborting lump of cells in the womb = epitome of evil
incinerating children with atomic bombs = heroism

sorry, but it had to be said

Well, sure. He’s President. People want to know what his stand on a situation like that would be, except he chooses his words very carefully and he’s going to obfuscate.

Hey, that’s what happens when you get a smart guy. He’s not going to be like the last guy and say the first thing that pops into his head if he can help it.

I suppose any question anyone wants to ask him is allowed, but it’s pretty ridiculous to expect him to answer it. He wasn’t there. It’s nearly impossible to say whether or not it was the “right” decision for the time, after the fact.

@augustlan You are dearly beloved, but what makes it “nearly impossible” to provide an accurate critique of a policy decision, even hundreds of years after the fact?

A few small examples: have you an opinion of the Marshall Plan? Have you an opinion of FDR’s decision to invade Normandy? Have you an opinion as to whether or not Brown v Board of Education was a just decision?

@pdworkin maybe just because its hard to point to the definitive direct effects (other than the obvious adverse ones) that it had. another examples is the WPA under Roosevelt? People still argue whether it helped or hurt the depression. you know?

@nzigler Well, some ideologues argue over the WPA, but most mainstream economists have been in agreement for some years that it was ameliorative. And a consensus is forming among military historians about the use of Atomic weapons at the end of World War Two.

We were absolutely right in nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but telling the Japanese reporters that, flat out, would be a bad idea, especially on the first visit.
Obama did all right.

@pdworkin Normally, I would agree with you on things like this. I argue with my husband (a history geek) about this kind of thing all the time. “It was so wrong!”, I wail. He always reminds me that, yes, in our eyes it is wrong, in our time. But… we didn’t live through that time, and don’t have all of the information and experiences of those who made such decisions. It’s a tricky thing for me to wrap my head around, as I am not a believer in relative morality. If it’s wrong, it has always been wrong, in my mind… but not everyone agrees.

In addition, while we can certainly see what happened as a result of such an action being taken, we cannot see what would have happened if it had not been taken. So, it becomes impossible to say with any certainty. I don’t know if I’m doing a very good job of explaining this, but that’s where I’m coming from.

Surely you don’t think that because we may err we should not form opinions. @filmfann just informed us the we were “absolutely right”, not ten minutes after I stated that it was indefensible. That’s what makes it baseball.

Point taken. :)

If nuclear disarmament is his goal, someone is going to ask him about it.

Was it a fair question? Yes.

Was it a constructive question? No.

Obama could easily have asked the questioner if the Japanese head of state felt the Chinese and the Koreans deserved an apology, or whether the well-documented war crimes committed by the Japanese were the result of a good decision, but he had the savvy not to. Fundamentally, the question was, in my opinion, valid, but naive (unless, of course, the questioner just wanted to see how good at dancing Obama is).

edit

Just for clarity – I’m not being anti-Japanese here; my wife is Japanese, I’ve spent five years of my life there, and am returning within the year.

@pdworkin I don’t see anywhere your using the word Indefensible before my comment.
Not using the bomb would have meant going in and taking Japan island by island. That would have cost 100,000 American lives, at least.

@filmfann or waiting a bit longer for the Japanese to capitulate to the US in face of impending Soviet invasion.

@filmfann I did not use the word indefensible, but certainly I implied that it was indefensible. Your argument was considered disingenuous even in 1945. The war was over. There was to have been no defense of the main islands, except in the minds of some vicious Generals who held office by means of thuggery and assassination. The bombs were used as a message to Stalin, and the debate in Truman’s cabinet was, use an island, or kill real people. Le May, who had organized the terror-bombing of civilians in Japan was the chief advocate for using the bombs on Japanese cities.

The war was over? They were no longer fighting? Do you have a source for this?

There is certainly disagreement on this point, but many contemporary military historians now believe that they were defeated before Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Do you want me to compile a reading list for you, or should we just agree to disagree?

You are certainly free to believe anything you want. I’m right

You are absolutely right. I am free to believe the latest consensus of military historians, and you are free to continue quoting old right-wingers from the 1950s.

Truman is not exactly a right winger.
If they were beaten…if they were defeated…why didn’t they surrender after the first bomb?
The Emperor didn’t even acknowledge the bomb was atomic until the second one was dropped.

No one had ever seen one before, remember? No one knew what it was. At any rate, there is no further point to the two of us arguing. We disagree. Have a good one.

The Japanese recognized it. They had their own Nuclear program, though it was far from having anything developed.
Okay, we can stop. People in the future, though, may wonder if this discussion had already been won before I asked why the Japanese didn’t surrender.

@filmfann—The Japanese didn’t surrender on Iwo Jima either, and that was one of the harshest, most deadly battlefields of the Pacific theatre. There were approximately 6800 Americans killed there, around 6,000 of them Marines, and approximately 140,000 Japanese. Not a single Japanese soldier surrendered or survived. They would rather blow themselves up with grenades than be captured by the Americans.

Replace Japanese reporter with German reporter. Replace Obama with Putin. Change topic to systematic rape and plunder of eastern Germany by the Red Army in 1945.

Interesting scenario, no? Would a German reporter have the stones to ask it? Would Putin strain his erudition any?

Before the knives, pokers and axes come out, let me add I’m drawing any equivalences between the those different events. Indeed, it’s more about bringing out contrasts in context I think. Maybe I should have retracted that one…

Anyway, back to the original question. A reference I’d recommend is Downfall by Richard Frank. I think it looks at the end of Pacific War in such a way that nobody gets a whitewash and events are kept in perspective.

LeMay was brought in to replace Hansell. Hansell went by the USAAF “book” and sent the B-29s to conduct daylight high-level “precision” attacks on specific Japanese industrial facilities with high explosive bombs. He failed to make much of an impact partly because the weather and high altitude winds were worse than over Germany. The strain caused by long flights at high altitude also caused problems with the B-29’s engines. There was enormous political pressure to get results given the resources that had been poured into the difficult B-29 development and mass production program. The AAF chief Hap Arnold felt it as the B-29’s main champion and he passed every bit of on to the field commanders.

LeMay was a driven individual willing to throw the book aside. Japanese cities had long been noted to be more tightly-packed with flammable and lightly-constructed buildings than German cities. LeMay studied the aerial photos and saw that the anti-aircraft artillery had very few 20 to 40 mm automatic cannon of the sort that would make low-level attacks dangerous. At the same time, the Japanese lacked a strong night fighter force. So he sent the B-29s in at low level, at night, with mostly incendiaries to area bomb. This was much more like the way the British had conducted their bombing campaign against the Germans. The results were spectacular firestorms that ate the heart out of the residential districts of Japanese cities (the Navy was to complain that this didn’t seem to effect the rate of Japanese aircraft production as evidenced by the waves of Kamikazes coming after their ships.). Once LeMay got going along these lines, a terrible sort of momentum built up. The spectacular became routine. Indeed, he was eventually given a list of cities to NOT firebomb in order that atomic bombs could be used on them instead.

If you take away the long term effects of radiation, then I would say the atypical firestorm created over Tokyo on March 10, 1945 was more horrific than either the Hiroshima or Nagasaki atomic bombings. With Dresden and Tokyo the U.S. (along with the British) had already crossed the line into indiscriminate mass killing of civilians, and in light of those events, refusing to use to the atomic bomb because of moral considerations would be rather inconsistent: it was just a different technical means to the same end.

At the same time, I don’t think any American general or politician really set out knowingly to reach this state of affairs. The B-29 was envisioned as bombing Japanese factories into the ground. While damage to the surroundings was inevitable, it was to be minimized as much as possible. Without factories, without a Navy and without hope of victory the Japanese were supposed to sue for peace. But circumstances got in the way. Weather and mechanical difficulties ruled out that sort of bombing and the insistence on unconditional surrender (something Roosevelt committed America to rather without forethought back in Casablanca) hardened Japanese resolve.

Putin’s mom caught him straining his etrudition once, and sent him to the gulag for week.

Of course. It’s a good question.

@the100thmonkey Japan offered China an apology for it’s WWII aggressions in 2005.

@oratio did that include the use of Comfort women?

@filmfann Not likely.

@oratio : but it didn’t come from the Japanese head of state – the emperor; it came from the then prime minister, who also made a point of visiting the Yasukuni shrine every year.

@the100thmonkey You are right. I guess one can’t have everything. China dismissed it anyway. Shouldn’t the Japanese honor their dead soldiers as well though?

@oratio: that’s a loaded question. Moreover, China arguably dismissed he apology because it didn’t come from the head of state.

When the “dead soldiers” include war criminals, there is, and always will be, a destructive element to honouring them.

@the100thmonkey I guess it might be. I’d say that all wars have war criminals. On both sides. But only those on the losing side gets indicted. There are many countries that hasn’t joined the ICC in Hague, for that very reason. I think that Japan should be able to honor their dead soldiers – that weren’t war criminals – just as the US does. But as you imply, it is maybe not as easy as that.