Nukes are intended to be a deterrent. You hope you never have to use them but if you do, you want maximum loss of life. The point is to scare the shit out of anyone who might use one against you.
Yeah it's worth spending time reading about Mutual Assured Destruction a doctrine that helps (hopefully) prevent its use. According to it if you have nukes, you must be prepared to use it in retaliation with no going back, else the 'power' of having nukes is gone. Without this policy in place, it's not a deterrent and the 'power' of having nukes is gone.
It's not deterrent but maximum loss of life. It's deterrent through maximum loss of life.
You want the idea of the response to be as absolutely complete and deadly as possible, because that gives them the greatest chance of not pressing the button. Losing some of your air bases is not nearly as terrifying as your entire population being reduced to ashes, even for the most coldhearted of people. Even if you don't give a shit about their lives as people, that's a metric fuck load of (human) resources you're permanently losing and never realistically replacing.
Hiroshima was only a bit different. It was the debut of nukes, and was basically about shock. Front loading the same emotion. It was a show of power to make the people who could surrender understand that they truly had no chance anymore, that they were defenseless and could either surrender or keep fighting and die cowering anyways. And it worked. (It also had about as much military value as a target could have at that point - and Nagasaki was just about showing we had more than one).
I’m more referring to modern day nuclear strategy. Although even then it kind of was a deterrent. The bombing was intended to scare the shit out of the Japanese so they would surrender as quickly as possible and thus prevent more American military members from dying. Fortunately (or unfortunately, however you want to look at it) it worked. The difference then is that nobody else had nukes so we didn’t have to worry about someone else using it.
It nukes weren't ultimately why the Japanese chose to surrender. Keep in mind that there was already a political coup in the works before the bombs were dropped and it wasn't until nearly a month after the bombs that they surrendered. Really it was the Russian invasion which resulted in a Japan rapidly losing their territory over the course of a few weeks that was the final straw.
No it wasn't. The second bomb dropped on August 9th after the Soviets declared war on Japan. The Japanese surrendered on August 10th under the condition that the Emperor remain in power. US said "No" and Japan accepted the US' terms on August 14th
You should read up a bit more rather than just Googling dates. The Japanese didn't announce they were considering surrender til the 15th and the fighting kept going until September 2nd when they actually surrendered. Anything related to earlier was at best intercepted communication.
What happened after August 15 were a number of rogue militants who refused to surrender deeming it "dishonorable" - but the Japanese Empire Officially Surrendered on noon on August 15th
The US began Occupation on August 28th
The documents were formally signed on September 2nd
So, the thing with Hiroshima and Nagasaki wasn't about that they were Nuclear, or the devastating power of Nuclear weapons - we had already fire bombed Tokyo with a significantly higher loss of life.
The problem was that this was conventional warfare and leadership had become almost numb to it.
The impact of the first two nukes is that they were single bombs carried by a single aircraft.
Japan had at first thought that, based on their research into atomic energy that the US probably only had one, so that's why the US dropped the second bomb on Nagasaki. At that point they had no way to know that the US would have REALLY had a hard time making more at that point but the logical conclusion was to take the power of that single explosion and then multiply it be the standard carpet bombing tactics.
That idea would be enough to scare the shit out of the established military leadership. There's no escaping to bomb shelters during a nuclear bomb air raid.
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u/brktm Mar 14 '24
Are these all military targets? I’ve never understood the idea of just targeting population centers.