Why did the u.s. bomb hiroshima and nagasaki

What happened on 6 August 1945? In the small hours of a warm summer day, the B-29 Superfortress Enola Gay flew from a US base on Tinian over the Japanese mainland. In the hold was an experimental bomb, codenamed Little Boy. The target: Hiroshima. In Hiroshima the air raid sirens had sounded twice that morning already. On both occasions the all clear followed swiftly. Enola Gay faced no resistance as it dropped the bomb. Forty five seconds later the city was destroyed in a blinding instant. Eighty thousand men, women and children were killed and tens of thousands wounded, disfigured and poisoned by radiation from the bomb. Three days later, another nuclear bomb was dropped on Nagasaki. A week later, Japan surrendered. The bomb brought World War Two to a sudden end, but was it right to use it? Why did America use the bomb? Conclusion of the war The bomb was dropped to force a quick Japanese surrender. American commanders said it would save money and the lives of American servicemen and Japanese soldiers and civilians too. They said that to continue the war for weeks or months with conventional bombing and a US land invasion could have caused millions of Japanese deaths. Retribution against the Japanese President Truman justified his decision by pointing to the unprovoked Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour and the murder of American prisoners. A few days after the bombing he wrote: “When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast.” Demonstration of power The...

Soon after arriving at the Potsdam Conference in July 1945, U.S. President On July 24, eight days after the According to Truman, he “casually mentioned” to Stalin that the United States had “a new weapon of unusual destructive force,” but Stalin didn’t seem especially interested. “All he said was that he was glad to hear it and hoped we would make ‘good use of it against the Japanese,’” Truman later wrote in his memoir, Year of Decisions. Soviet Intelligence Knew About the Bomb For Truman, news of the successful Trinity test President Harry Truman, with a radio at hand aboard the cruiser USS Augusta, reads reports of the first atomic bomb raid on Japan, while en route home from the Potsdam conference on August 6, 1945.  Truman never mentioned the words “atomic” or “nuclear” to Stalin, and the assumption on the U.S. side was that the Soviet premier didn’t know the exact nature of the new weapon. In fact, while Truman himself had first learned of the top-secret U.S. program to develop atomic weapons just READ MORE: Harry Truman and Hiroshima: Inside His Tense A-Bomb Vigil While Stalin didn’t take the atomic threat as seriously during wartime as some of his spies did—he had other problems on his hands, thanks to the German onslaught and occupation—Truman’s words at Potsdam made more of an impact than the president realized. “We now know that Stalin immediately went to his subordinates and said, we need to get Kurchatov working faster on this,” says Gregg Herken, eme...

The first phase was the United States’ roughly seven-year occupation of Japan, which began following the surrender. When Japan got a new constitution, which took effect on May 3, 1947, its terms came largely courtesy of American influence, specifically that of U.S. General Douglas MacArthur and his staff. For example, while the new constitution democratized the political structure of Japan, it also kept Emperor Hirohito as the nation’s symbolic leader, per MacArthur’s wishes. “Japan experts said if you dismantle the emperor system, there will be chaos,” explains Michael Green, senior vice president for Asia and Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) and director of Asian Studies at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. The constitution also made a key determination about Japan’s military future: Article 9 included a two-part clause stating that “Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes” and, to accomplish that goal, that “land, sea and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained.” Though it was meant to keep the peace, the clause created an unequal power dynamic — the military force of the occupying power was growing while that of the occupied nation was stuck — and thus led to problems of its own. “The U.S. could use its Japanese bases to support military action elsewhere in...