The programs long predate the fall of Germany, and thus saying they were developed to compete with a German nuclear program are completely accurate and reasonable.
The Japanese were in the war, and a land borne invasion would have bore heavy casualties. There was no clear and obvious certainty of Japans will to surrender, and there was political infighting, an attempted coup against the surrender.
I'm tired of this inaccurate, revisionist, fringe crap coming up every time the atomic weapons program comes up. This is not mainstream history, but historical-fiction entertainers like the irresponsible Oliver Stone keep promoting it and people lap it up.
There was a moral argument to be made in favor of atomic bombing for political effect. However, that argument was not very influential on military decision making at the time - generally, the military philosophy was "we have a weapon, why would we not use it to the greatest extent possible?" This disconnect was so strong that when the civilians who were making these sophisticated moral calculations saw the manner and (more importantly) the rate at which the bombs were used, they put on the brakes.
>This disconnect was so strong that when the civilians who were making these sophisticated moral calculations saw the manner and (more importantly) the rate at which the bombs were used, they put on the brakes.
Those civilians names were not auto-penned at the bottom of letters that started with "The United States Army regrets to inform you...". Those civilians had not seen what kind of end conventional warfare had lead to on inner islands like Iwo Jima and Okinawa. They did not understand how committed to their cause the people we were fighting were. The disconnect goes both ways.
On the contrary; they knew exactly what kind of relentless bombing the Allied Armed forces were willing to undertake, completely leveling non-military cities with conventional munitions just to break the will of the “enemy”. The civilians rightly feared that with these new weapons of war, the similar indiscriminate use of them could result in efficient wiping out of cities in days rather than years.
At the time of their invention, nuclear weapons were seen as more effective munitions and not necessarily the civilization ending tools that they are now considered to be.
> The programs long predate the fall of Germany, and thus saying they were developed to compete with a German nuclear program are completely accurate and reasonable.
The existence of the atomic program is not the question. It is their _use_ against a nation that was on the brink of surrender.
I'm sorry that the truth does not fit your neat model of the US. It stands to reason, that the only nation in the world to use atomic weapons against dense human populations needs to be scrutinized appropriately, and not hailed as the "hero", the decision to do so being "inevitable". Nothing about the use of nuclear weapons was inevitable, and their use simply egged on similar development in other nations and a general increase in the probability of nuclear holocaust.
The Japanese were in the war, and a land borne invasion would have bore heavy casualties. There was no clear and obvious certainty of Japans will to surrender, and there was political infighting, an attempted coup against the surrender.
I'm tired of this inaccurate, revisionist, fringe crap coming up every time the atomic weapons program comes up. This is not mainstream history, but historical-fiction entertainers like the irresponsible Oliver Stone keep promoting it and people lap it up.