While your point about a world that hadn’t used nuclear weapons being safer today is unclear, I think your claim that ‘you wouldn’t drop the bomb’ is driven by hindsight bias. At the time, the far more pressing issue from Truman’s perspective was how to end the war with a minimum loss of US life, and the long term consequences of the bomb were far from clear.
I also think that memorials like Hiroshima Day pervert the overall moral perspective on World War 2. Because it was a large, salient act of destruction, it gets remembered. The Burma Railway and the Rape of Nanking (brutality which didn’t even serve any strategic purpose) don’t have any memorials. It is a gross distortion for Hiroshima to let the Japanese be primarily viewed as the victims of World War 2. EVERYTHING about World War 2 was horrible, but you can’t only emphasise one bit of that horror without affecting the overall perception.
As to the question of why you didn’t want to just have a show of force, I remember Victor Davis Hanson arguing that in order to prevent conflicts from re-starting later, there is a psychological importance in the enemy realising that they are well and truly beaten. Without this, he argued, it’s possible for revisionists to re-stoke the conflict later. Hitler did exactly this when he claimed that the German army in WW1 was on the verge of victory when it was stabbed in the back by politicians at home, instead of actually being days away from total defeat. Say what you will about the bomb, but it certainly let the Japanese know that they were beaten, and Japanese militarism hasn’t resurfaced since.
In a repeated game of Prisoners Dilemma, Tit-For-Tat seems to be a dominant strategy. With Hiroshima, the Japanese found out that payback’s a bitch. The only injustice is to the extent that the individuals who bore the brunt of the attack weren’t personally the ones who instigated it, but this is true of every war in history. I feel for their suffering, but no more or less than any other civilians in World War 2, or anywhere else.
While your point about a world that hadn’t used nuclear weapons being safer today is unclear, I think your claim that ‘you wouldn’t drop the bomb’ is driven by hindsight bias. At the time, the far more pressing issue from Truman’s perspective was how to end the war with a minimum loss of US life, and the long term consequences of the bomb were far from clear.
I also think that memorials like Hiroshima Day pervert the overall moral perspective on World War 2. Because it was a large, salient act of destruction, it gets remembered. The Burma Railway and the Rape of Nanking (brutality which didn’t even serve any strategic purpose) don’t have any memorials. It is a gross distortion for Hiroshima to let the Japanese be primarily viewed as the victims of World War 2. EVERYTHING about World War 2 was horrible, but you can’t only emphasise one bit of that horror without affecting the overall perception.
As to the question of why you didn’t want to just have a show of force, I remember Victor Davis Hanson arguing that in order to prevent conflicts from re-starting later, there is a psychological importance in the enemy realising that they are well and truly beaten. Without this, he argued, it’s possible for revisionists to re-stoke the conflict later. Hitler did exactly this when he claimed that the German army in WW1 was on the verge of victory when it was stabbed in the back by politicians at home, instead of actually being days away from total defeat. Say what you will about the bomb, but it certainly let the Japanese know that they were beaten, and Japanese militarism hasn’t resurfaced since.
In a repeated game of Prisoners Dilemma, Tit-For-Tat seems to be a dominant strategy. With Hiroshima, the Japanese found out that payback’s a bitch. The only injustice is to the extent that the individuals who bore the brunt of the attack weren’t personally the ones who instigated it, but this is true of every war in history. I feel for their suffering, but no more or less than any other civilians in World War 2, or anywhere else.