Why did america drop the atomic bombs on japan?

Answer 1

The US dropped the atomic bombs on Japan to shock Japan's government into ending the war without an invasion. While an invasion would cost the lives of nearly one million US soldiers, half a million British soldiers, every Allied POW in Japan, and at the very least a majority of the Japanese people living in Japan, dropping the bombs caused over 250,000 casualties. It was decided that dropping the bombs would ultimately cause less casualties than any other method of ending the war.

Answer 2

The US wanted to end the war, and they felt the only options were to either use the atomic bomb, or stage an invasion of mainland Japan. The invasion of Japan called for massive numbers of troops that had been serving in Europe to join the forces fighting in the Pacific theater. The government of Japan was fanatical and was not likely to surrender unless it could no longer wage war. Casualty estimates for the American forces were staggering, coming to a number of 500,000. President Truman and his advisors deemed this an unacceptable cost and therefore decided to drop the atomic bombs on Nagasaki and Hiroshima to force Japan to surrender.

1. The US had atomic bombs available.
2. The US was already using (or preparing to use) every conventional weapon available (including chemical weapons, despite the fact they were prohibited by the Geneva Convention).
3. The Japanese troops on the pacific islands refused to surrender and usually fought until all had been killed! It was expected this would be even worse during an invasion of Japan itself!
4. If every possible weapon (conventional or nonconventional) was not used the war could last many years.

The US was prepared to make and use 23 atomic bombs on Japan before the end of 1945 and many more in 1946, 1947, etc. until Japan surrendered. I believe that Truman and the US Military were completely surprised that it only took the first 2 atomic bombs to get a Japanese surrender!!!
The Us used atomic bombs in WW2 because the experinces with fighting the Japanese in places such as iwo Jima and Okinawa made it obvious that the Japanese would fight to the death for every inch of their homeland. The Japanese had a very strong army at the time as well. Putting these two together American genrals concluded that a invasion of military personell of the Japanese mainland would result in thousands of US casulities. The us had already lost many troops in WW2 abd didnt want to lose more. So they chose the altenative which is as we know to use the atomic bomb to force Japan to surrender and it worked.

Their has been many arguments wether this was the right thing to.
In May 1943, the U.S. was planning to use the bomb not on Germany but Japan. The following September, the U.S. and British leaders agreed to use the bomb against Japan. After spring 1945, with Japan in an extremely weak position, the United States was considering the following ways of bringing the long war to an end: invade the Japanese mainland in November 1945, ask the Soviet Union to join the war against Japan, use of chemical weapons should Japan resist the invasion as they had on the last few islands, assure continuation of the emperor system (but only as a figurehead), or use the atomic bomb. The U.S. believed that if the atomic bomb could end the war, Soviet influence after the war would be restricted and domestically the tremendous cost of development would be justified.

Truman probably also had some concern that he might be impeached if congress discovered that the atomic bomb was available and could have been used to shorten the war, had the war lasted at least a year longer as predicted by the planners of the invasion, if the atomic bomb was not used and the money used to develop it was seen as wasted.

The Allies demanded unconditional surrender of the Axis. In the Pacific Theatre, the Allies, led by the United States, rolled up the Japanese expansion island by island. When Guam was taken, the Allies had a base from which stage an invasion. The estimates of American casualties for an invasion of mainland Japan was in excess of 1 million Americans. Possibly in excess of 2 million Americans. The United States dropped two atomic bombs to save American lives and speed the end of the war. Prior to using the atomic bomb, Japan was given ultimatums to surrender along with warnings of the dire consequences. The Japanese government ignored the warnings. While the use of the atomic bomb was a technological and strategic turning point in both WWII and all future diplomatic and strategic activities, there were more people killed, maimed, and injured during the Tokyo firebombing campaigns than by the atomic bomb. To force Japan to surrender and to end WW2.

First off, they dropped 2 atomic bombs in World War 2 not in the veitnam war. They dropped them because that was the only way they were able to get japan to surrender. Their motto was that they would rather die that surrender so USA dropped one bomb and they still didn't surrender so then they dropped another and threatened to keep dropping them until they surrndered. Thankfully, they did not have to drop a third bomb because Japan surrendered.

From Source: Weber, Mark "Was Hiroshima Necessary? Why the Atomic Bombings could have been avoided" The Journal of Historical Review, May-June 1997 (Vol. 16, No. 3), pages 4-11. In a 1986 study, historian and journalist Edwin P. Hoyt nailed the "great myth, perpetuated by well-meaning people throughout the world," that "the atomic bomb caused the surrender of Japan." In Japan's War: The Great Pacific Conflict(p. 420), he explained:

"The fact is that as far as the Japanese militarists were concerned, the atomic bomb was just another weapon. The two atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki were icing on the cake, and did not do as much damage as the firebombings of Japanese cities. The B-29 firebombing campaign had brought the destruction of 3,100,000 homes, leaving 15 million people homeless, and killing about a million of them. It was the ruthless firebombing, and Hirohito's realization that if necessary the Allies would completely destroy Japan and kill every Japanese to achieve "unconditional surrender" that persuaded him to the decision to end the war. The atomic bomb is indeed a fearsome weapon, but it was not the cause of Japan's surrender, even though the myth persists even to this day."

In a trenchant new book, The Decision to Drop the Atomic Bomb (Praeger, 1996), historian Dennis D. Wainstock concludes that the bombings were not only unnecessary, but were based on a vengeful policy that actually harmed American interests. He writes (pp. 124, 132):

... By April 1945, Japan's leaders realized that the war was lost. Their main stumbling block to surrender was the United States' insistence on unconditional surrender. They specifically needed to know whether the United States would allow Hirohito to remain on the throne. They feared that the United States would depose him, try him as a war criminal, or even execute him ... Unconditional surrender was a policy of revenge, and it hurt America's national self-interest. It prolonged the war in both Europe and East Asia, and it helped to expand Soviet power in those areas. General Douglas MacArthur, Commander of US Army forces in the Pacific, stated on numerous occasions before his death that the atomic bomb was completely unnecessary from a military point of view: "My staff was unanimous in believing that Japan was on the point of collapse and surrender." General Curtis LeMay, who had pioneered precision bombing of Germany and Japan (and who later headed the Strategic Air Command and served as Air Force chief of staff), put it most succinctly: "The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war.

Answer 3

The US realized that to invade Japan and take back all of the islands would cost too many American lives. In order to force a quick surrender and prevent further loss of American life, they decided to drop the atomic bomb. After the first atomic bomb was dropped, the United States gave the emperor of Japan an ultimatum: "Surrender unconditionally or we'll drop another bomb on you." The emperor refused and the US dropped the second atomic bomb, after which Japan promptly surrendered.

Answer 4

The Allies required unconditional surrender of the Japanese forces. The war in Europe had ended months before. When surrender did not come after the first bombing, a second bombing was carried out about 3 days later. About a week after the second bomb, Japan surrendered. See link for more details.

Answer 5

The first bomb, code named 'Little Boy' was dropped on August 6, 1945, over the city of Hiroshima. Japan had ignored the call for their surrender in the Potsdam Declaration, July 26 1945. Also, the bombing on August 6 followed 6 months of intense fire bombing of various cities in Japan. Japan was silent after the bombing of Hiroshima; there was still no response to Potsdam. The second bombing was scheduled to happen on August 11, but forecasts of bad weather resulted in moving the date up to August 9. After 3 days of silence from Japan's leadership, the second bomb, code named 'Fat Man' was dropped. Nagasaki was the back-up target; the original target, Kokura, was overcast that day.

More bombs were being readied for use against Japan, and the motivation for use of the bombs seems to have been a desire to prevent a ground attack on Japan, or for future bombs to be part of a major ground invasion. The Japanese finally surrendered on August 15, 1945, ending concerns about a ground invasion of Japan. This was the first and to date the only time that atomic weapons have been used in war.

The use of these weapons was widely supported by the majority of the US population, at least at first. Since that time, the ethics of the decision to release the bombs has been and continues to be strongly debated.

Answer 6

The bombing is still, over 65 years after it happened, a pretty controversial decision. The official answer is that President Truman ordered the bombings to end the war quickly and decisively.

In the Allied conferences near the end of the war, it was decided that the Axis nations needed to fully surrender "unconditionally" in order to prevent another war, as happened after World War I (in that war, Germany didn't surrender unconditionally- they signed an armistice and eventually negotiated a treaty. Twenty years later, Germany started an even bigger war). Germany was defeated and surrendered in early May 1945, but Japan kept fighting.

The Allies were winning the war with Japan, but it was bogging down into a costly, bloody affair. Some examples of the bloodshed- in early 1945, the Allies had captured the island of Iwo Jima, a tiny island not far from Japan, at the cost of over 26,000 casualties. Then in the summer of 1945, the Allies suffered over 80,000 casualties capturing Okinawa, another tiny island not far from Japan.

So as the Allies closed in on the Japanese home islands, the fighting became fiercer. The Allies were drawing up plans for an invasion of Japan- since Japan showed no signs of surrendering- and all of the plans predicted massive destruction and millions of casualties. Truman and supporters of the decision believe that by unleashing nuclear weapons on Japan, they caused Japan to surrender more quickly.

It's controversial, as mentioned earlier, because it's not totally clear that it had the intended effect (other factors came into play, such as the Soviet Union's declaration of war on Japan), the Allies' role in indirectly encouraging Japan to fight on (via the Potsdam Declaration), and the serious ethical questions regarding annihilating hundreds of thousands of people in the blink of an eye. That's a debate that has raged since before the bombs even fell.

The US did not decide to drop two atomic bombs on Japan, the decision was to drop as many as needed to force Japan to surrender and we had production plans and facilities to manufacture and drop a total of twenty three atomic bombs on Japan in 1945 alone. It was the Japanese that decided to surrender and stop it at two bombs.

Another thing to remember is that after meeting the strong resistance by the Japanese at the last few islands, the US began stockpiling chemical weapons (e.g. several types of nerve gases, mustard gas, phosgene gas) in preparation for use in the invasion of Japan if similar resistance was encountered. Even before the decision was made to use the atomic bomb, the US was already 100% committed to the use of these chemical weapons. However Japan had already used chemical weapons in China and elsewhere and the Allies had declared such use by Japan to be War Crimes. What might our use of chemical weapons against Japan be seen as? The atomic bomb was seen as a way out of this dilemma.

Answer 7

Under the Japanese code of Honor (Bushido) it was better to die than surrender. The casualty rates in the South Pacific war show this. The estimated casualties of invading Japan were approximately 10 million people (500,000 US dead and 3,500,000 wounded plus 4 million Japanese deaths and 2 million wounded). The bombing shocked the Japanese enough to overcome a cultural bias of death over surrender. It saved millions of lives and prevented millions more from suffering.

Answer 8

to stop the spread of communism

It was dropped so that Japan would surrender, but since they didn't we dropped another one on them.