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Although supporters of the bombing concede that the civilian leadership in Japan was cautiously and discreetly sending out diplomatic communiques as far back as January 1945, following the Allied invasion of Luzon in the Philippines, they point out that Japanese military officials were unanimously opposed to any negotiations before the use of the atomic bomb.
While some members of the civilian leadership did use covert diplomatic channels to begin negotiation for peace, on their own they could not negotiate surrender or even a cease-fire. 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 Navy, 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. Many continued to believe that Japan could negotiate more favorable terms of surrender by continuing to inflict high levels of casualties on opposing forces and end the war without an occupation of Japan or a change of government.
Historian Victor Davis Hanson points to the increased Japanese resistance, futile though it was in retrospect, as it became obvious that the result of the war could not be overturned by the Axis powers. The Battle of Okinawa showed this determination to fight on at all costs. More than 120,000 Japanese and 18,000 American troops were killed in the bloodiest battle of the Pacific theater, just 8 weeks before Japan's final surrender. In fact, more civilians died in the Battle of Okinawa than did in the initial blast of the atomic bombings. When the Soviet Union declared war on Japan on August 8, 1945, and carried out Operation August Storm, the Japanese Imperial Army ordered its ill-supplied and weakened forces in Manchuria to fight to the last man. 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 minimal losses.
After the realization that the destruction of Hiroshima was from a nuclear weapon, the civilian leadership gained more traction in its argument that Japan had to concede defeat and accept the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. Even after the destruction of Nagasaki, the emperor himself needed to intervene to end a deadlock in the cabinet.
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, as were the military men in the war cabinet. (Because the cabinet functioned by consensus, even one holdout could prevent it from accepting the declaration.) Thus the peace faction seized on the bombing as a new argument to force surrender. Koichi Kido, one of Emperor Hirohito's closest advisors, stated: “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 Nagasaki to convince the military that no amount of courage, skill and fearless combat could help Japan against the power of atomic weapons. Akio Morita, founder of Sony and a Japanese Naval officer during the war, also concludes that it was the atomic bomb and not conventional bombings from B-29s that convinced the Japanese military to agree to peace.
Supporters of the bombing also point out that waiting for the Japanese to surrender was not a cost-free option—as a result of the war, noncombatants were dying throughout Asia at a rate of about 200,000 per month. Firebombing had killed well over 100,000 people in Japan since February of 1945, directly and indirectly. That intensive conventional bombing would have continued prior to an invasion. The submarine blockade and the United States Army Air Forces's mining operation, Operation Starvation, had effectively cut off Japan's imports. A complementary operation against Japan's railways was about to begin, isolating the cities of southern Honshu from the food grown elsewhere in the Home Islands. This, combined with the delay in relief supplies from the Allies, could have resulted in a far greater death toll in Japan from famine and malnutrition than actually occurred in the attacks. “Immediately after the defeat, some estimated that 10 million people were likely to starve to death,” noted historian Daikichi Irokawa. Meanwhile, in addition to the Soviet attacks, offensives were scheduled for September in southern China and Malaysia.
The Americans anticipated losing many soldiers in the planned invasion of Japan, although the actual number of expected fatalities and wounded is subject to some debate and depends on the persistence and reliability of Japanese resistance and whether the Americans would have invaded only Kyushu in November 1945 or if a follow up landing near Tokyo, projected for March of 1946, would have been needed. Years after the war, Secretary of State James Byrnes claimed that 500,000 American lives would have been lost—and that number has since been repeated authoritatively, but in the summer of 1945, U.S. military planners projected 20,000–110,000 combat deaths from the initial November 1945 invasion, with about three to four times that number wounded. (Total U.S. combat deaths on all fronts in World War II in nearly four years of war were 292,000.) However, these estimates were done using intelligence that grossly underestimated Japanese strength being gathered for the battle of Kyushu in numbers of soldiers and kamikazes, by factors of at least three. Many military advisors held that a worst-case scenario could involve up to 1,000,000 American casualties.
The atomic bomb hastened the end of the Second World War in Asia liberating hundreds of thousands of Western citizens, including about 200,000 Dutch and 400,000 Indonesians (“Romushas”) from Japanese concentration camps. Moreover, Japanese troops had committed atrocities against millions of civilians (such as the infamous Nanking Massacre), and the early end to the war prevented further bloodshed.
Supporters also point to an order given by the Japanese War Ministry on August 1, 1944. The order dealt with the disposal and execution of all Allied POWs, numbering over 100,000, if an invasion of the Japanese mainland took place.[35] It is also likely that, considering Japan's previous treatment of POWs, were the Allies to wait out Japan and starve it, the Japanese would have killed all Allied POWs and Chinese prisoners.
In response to the argument that the large-scale killing of civilians was immoral and a war crime, supporters of the bombings have argued that the Japanese government waged total war, ordering many civilians (including women and children) to work in factories and military offices and to fight against any invading force. Father John A. Siemes, professor of modern philosophy at Tokyo's Catholic University, and an eyewitness to the atomic bomb attack on Hiroshima wrote:
“We have discussed among ourselves the ethics of the use of the bomb. Some consider it in the same category as poison gas and were against its use on a civil population. Others were of the view that in total war, as carried on in Japan, there was no difference between civilians and soldiers, and that the bomb itself was an effective force tending to end the bloodshed, warning Japan to surrender and thus to avoid total destruction. It seems logical to me that he who supports total war in principle cannot complain of war against civilians.”[36]
Some supporters of the bombings have emphasized the strategic significance of Hiroshima, as the Japanese 2nd army's headquarters, and of Nagasaki, as a major munitions manufacturing center.
Some historians have claimed that U.S. planners wanted to end the war quickly to minimize potential Soviet acquisition of Japanese-held territory.
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Objections to the bombings generally emphasize one or both of two points: That the bombings were inherently immoral due to the massive civilian casualties and the unique nature of nuclear weapons, and that the bombings were unjustified and unnecessary for military purposes.
Inherently immoral
A number of notable individuals and organizations have criticized the bombings on moral grounds, many of them characterizing them as a war crime or crime against humanity. Two early critics of the bombings were Albert Einstein and Leo Szilard, who had together spurred the first bomb research in 1939 with a jointly written letter to President Roosevelt. Szilard, who had gone on to play a major role in the Manhattan Project, 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.”
In 1946, a report by the Federal Council of Churches entitled Atomic Warfare and the Christian Faith, includes the following passage:
“As American Christians, we are deeply penitent for the irresponsible use already made of the atomic bomb. We are agreed that, whatever be one's judgment of the war in principle, the surprise bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are morally indefensible.”
In 1963 the bombings were subjected to judicial review in Shimoda et al. v. The State[37]. On the 22nd anniversary of the attack on Pearl Harbor, the District Court of Tokyo declined to rule on the legality of nuclear weapons in general, but found that “the attacks upon Hiroshima and Nagasaki caused such severe and indiscriminate suffering that they did violate the most basic legal principles governing the conduct of war.”[38] In the opinion of the court, the act of dropping an atomic bomb on cities was at the time governed by international law found in the Hague Regulations on Land Warfare of 1907 and the Hague Draft Rules of Air Warfare of 1922–1923.[39] and was therefore illegal.[40]
As the first military use of nuclear weapons, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represent to some the crossing of a crucial barrier. Peter Kuznick, director of the Nuclear Studies Institute at American University in Washington DC wrote of President Truman:
”He knew he was beginning the process of annihilation of the species. It was not just a war crime; it was a crime against humanity."[41]
Kurznick is one of several observers who believe that the U.S. was largely motivated in carrying out the bombings by a desire to demonstrate the power of its new weapon to the Soviet Union. Historian Mark Selden of Cornell University has stated “Impressing Russia was more important than ending the war in Japan.” [41]
Militarily unnecessary
Those who argue that the bombings were unnecessary on military grounds hold that Japan was already essentially defeated and ready to surrender.
One of the most notable individuals with this opinion was then-General Dwight D. Eisenhower. He wrote in his memoir The White House Years:
“In 1945 Secretary of War Stimson, visiting my headquarters in Germany, informed me that our government was preparing to drop an atomic bomb on Japan. I was one of those who felt that there were a number of cogent reasons to question the wisdom of such an act. During his recitation of the relevant facts, I had been conscious of a feeling of depression and so I voiced to him my grave misgivings, first on the basis of my belief that Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary, and secondly because I thought that our country should avoid shocking world opinion by the use of a weapon whose employment was, I thought, no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.”[42][43]
Other U.S. military officers who disagreed with the necessity of the bombings include General Douglas MacArthur (the highest-ranking officer in the Pacific Theater), Fleet Admiral William D. 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),[43] Major General Curtis LeMay,[44] and Admiral Ernest King, U.S. Chief of Naval Operations, Undersecretary of the Navy Ralph A. Bard,[45] and Fleet Admiral Chester W. Nimitz, Commander in Chief of the Pacific Fleet.[46]
The United States Strategic Bombing Survey, after interviewing hundreds of Japanese civilian and military leaders after Japan surrendered, reported:
“Based on a detailed investigation of all the facts, and supported by the testimony of the surviving Japanese leaders involved, it is the Survey's opinion that certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated.”[47]
The survey assumed that continued conventional bombing attacks on Japan—with additional direct and indirect casualties—would be needed to force surrender by the November or December dates mentioned.
Many, including General MacArthur, have contended that Japan would have surrendered before the bombings if the U.S. had notified Japan that it would accept a surrender that allowed Emperor Hirohito to keep his position as titular leader of Japan, a condition the U.S. did in fact allow after Japan surrendered. Before the bombings, the position of the Japanese leadership with regards to surrender was divided. Several diplomats favored surrender, while the leaders of the Japanese military voiced a committment to fighting a “decisive battle” on Kyushu, hoping that they could negotiate better terms for an armistice afterward. The Japanese government did not decide what terms, beyond preservation of an imperial system, they would have accepted to end the war; as late as August 9, the Supreme War Council was still split, with the hardliners insisting Japan should demobilize its own forces, no war crimes trials would be conducted, and no occupation of Japan would be allowed. Only the direct intervention of the emperor ended the dispute, and even then a military coup was attempted to prevent the surrender.
What was originally the Hiroshima Prefectural Industrial Promotion Hall has now been turned into the Hiroshima Peace Memorial. The atomic bomb exploded almost directly overhead.Others have argued that the U.S. should have waited a short time to gauge the effect of the Soviet Union's entry into the war. The U.S. knew, as Japan did not, that the Soviet Union had agreed to declare war on Japan three months after V-E Day, and the Soviets did indeed attack Japanese forces in Manchuria, Sakhalin Island, and the Kuril Islands on August 8, 1945. This represented the loss of any possibility that the Soviet Union would serve as a neutral mediator for a negotiated peace, as well as the entry into combat of the Red Army, the largest active army in the world. Because no U.S. invasion was immediately imminent, it is argued that the U.S. had nothing to lose by waiting several days to see whether these events would convince Japan to surrender without use of the atom bomb. Historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa's research has led him to conclude that the atomic bombings themselves were not even the principal reason for capitulation. Instead, he contends, it was the swift and devastating Soviet victories in Manchuria that forced the Japanese surrender on August 15, 1945.[48]
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Takk fyrir að skella þessu lesmáli upp og vonandi að sem flestir skoði þessi rök með eða á móti sem þarna er hægt að lesa.Grunar að margir hafi t.d ekki heyrt hver afstaða General Dwight D.Eisenhower og General Douglas MacArthur var í þessu máli og margra annara skynsamra manna,Albert Einstein til dæimis.
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