What's your point of view in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb?

[rocketpig]

The Ghost of RubangB said:
We narrowed it down to 7 or 8 cities.  Then we bombed the entire country except for those cities.  We didn't know which one we were going to bomb yet, and decided that on that date we'd bomb the city with the best weather.  We bombed the whole country except for Kyoto and Nara (due to their huge clusters of thousand-year old temples and shrines) and those 7 or 8 cities (because we wanted those cities to be completely unscathed before the bomb, for the before and after pictures).

When the bomb hit, Hiroshima wasn't the powerful command center we'd like to think it was.  Japan was already running out of soldiers, ammo, fuel, and food.  The city had some soldiers of course, but it was mostly women, children, and Koreans.

The U.S. hid all this info for several decades, but after the Cold War they donated those photos and this information to Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Museum as a token of good will.

There were very few intact cities remaining in Japan because of the extensive fire bombing, yes. But it was NOT based on weather. Hiroshima was one of only four targets picked and it ended up being picked as number one well before the planes launched.

Directy from Wiki (with sources):

On May 10–11, 1945, the Target Committee at Los Alamos, led by J. Robert Oppenheimer, recommended Kyoto, Hiroshima, Yokohama, and the arsenal at Kokura as possible targets. The target selection was subject to the following criteria:

• The target was larger than three miles in diameter and was an important target in a large urban area.
• The blast would create effective damage.
• The target was unlikely to be attacked by August 1945. "Any small and strictly military objective should be located in a much larger area subject to blast damage in order to avoid undue risks of the weapon being lost due to bad placing of the bomb."^[16]

These cities were largely untouched during the nightly bombing raids and the Army Air Force agreed to leave them off the target list so accurate assessment of the weapon could be made. Hiroshima was described as "an important army depot and port of embarkation in the middle of an urban industrial area. It is a good radar target and it is such a size that a large part of the city could be extensively damaged. There are adjacent hills which are likely to produce a focusing effect which would considerably increase the blast damage. Due to rivers it is not a good incendiary target."^[16] The goal of the weapon was to convince Japan to surrender unconditionally in accordance with the terms of the Potsdam Declaration. The Target Committee stated that "It was agreed that psychological factors in the target selection were of great importance. Two aspects of this are (1) obtaining the greatest psychological effect against Japan and (2) making the initial use sufficiently spectacular for the importance of the weapon to be internationally recognized when publicity on it is released. Kyoto had the advantage of being an important center for military industry, as well an intellectual center and hence better able to appreciate the significance of the weapon. The Emperor's palace in Tokyo has a greater fame than any other target but is of least strategic value."^[16]

During World War II, Edwin O. Reischauer was the Japan expert for the U.S. Army Intelligence Service, in which role he is incorrectly said to have prevented the bombing of Kyoto.^[17] In his autobiography, Reischauer specifically refuted the validity of this claim:

"...the only person deserving credit for saving Kyoto from destruction is Henry L. Stimson, the Secretary of War at the time, who had known and admired Kyoto ever since his honeymoon there several decades earlier."^[18]